WASHINGTON: The US State department designated on Tuesday an Indian-origin militant and a Belgian citizen of Moroccan origin as global terrorists.

Siddhartha Dhar, born in Britain, was a leading member of now-defunct terrorist organisation Al-Muhaj­ir­o­un. In late 2014, Dhar left the United Kingdom to travel to Syria to join the militant Islamic State group.

He is considered to have replaced IS executioner Mohammad Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John”.

The State Department said that Dhar was the masked leader who appeared in a January 2016 IS video, which showed the execution of several IS prisoners accused of spying for the UK.

The department also said that Belgian-Moroccan citizen Abdelatif Gaini was fighting for IS in the Middle East. Gaini is connected to UK-based IS sympathisers Mohamad Ali Ahmed and Humza Ali, who were convicted in the UK in 2016 of terrorism offences.

Besides the confiscating their properties, the designation prohibits US citizens from engaging in any transactions with them and often leads to other governments taking similar actions.

In 2016, a Yazidi teenager, Nihad Barakat, held as a sex slave by ISIS, said that she was kidnapped and trafficked by Siddhartha, who was then based in Mosul, the group’s Iraqi stronghold.

Published in Dawn, January 24th, 2018