Amal Clooney leads lawsuit against French cement firm which ‘helped IS build bunkers’
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Amal Clooney is spearheading a lawsuit against a French construction company accused by Yazidis of helping Islamic State (IS) construct hostage tunnels.
The 427-strong group represented by Ms Clooney claim that Lafarge SA, a cement manufacturer, funnelled money and supplies to the terror group as it rampaged across Iraq and Syria a decade ago.
It allegedly provided IS with construction materials used to build underground tunnels and bunkers that supported its persecution of the Kurdish-speaking ethnic and religious minority community.
Ms Clooney said that Lefarge “ramped up its support for IS” in 2014, after the beginning of the terror group’s genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq and Syria, having already funded it for 12 months before.
The company last year admitted to paying IS and fellow terror group the Al-Nusra Front almost $6 million (£4.7 million) in exchange for permission to operate a cement plant in Syria from 2013 to 2014 following a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation.
Claims company provided materials to IS
The latest case, filed under anti-terror laws in New York City on Thursday, is seeking compensation for the Yazidis, who lawyers argue have not received any of the $777 million in fines Lafarge SA has already paid.
It aims “to hold Lafarge accountable for its admitted criminal conspiracy with IS and to obtain justice for the Yazidi people,” a statement from Amal Clooney Media said.
The lawsuit claims that the company, the world’s biggest cement manufacturer, provided materials to IS for the construction of subterranean structures used to shelter terrorists and hide hostages.
“It is shocking that a leading global corporation worked hand in hand with IS while IS was executing American civilians and committing genocide against Yazidis,” Ms Clooney said.
“We hope that this case will send a clear message that supporting terrorists cannot be ‘business as usual’ and that there will be justice for the victims,” she added, describing the lawsuit as the “first meaningful chance for compensation for these victims of IS”.
Nobel Prize winner is lead plaintiff
The lead plaintiff in the case being led by Ms Clooney is Nadia Murad, a Nobel Prize winner who was held by IS for three months in 2014.
The 426 other plaintiffs are all American citizens of Yazidi and Iraqi descent whose “families are survivors of a systematic genocide against the Yazidi people that began in Sinjar, Iraq in 2014,” the statement from Amal Clooney Media said.
The Yazidis are an ancient religious group in eastern Syria and northwest Iraq that IS viewed as supposed devil worshippers for their faith that combines Zoroastrian, Christian, Manichean, Jewish and Muslim beliefs.
The jihadist group killed thousands of the Kurdish-speaking minority, enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and girls and displaced most of the 550,000-strong community from their ancestral home in northern Iraq.
Holcim, which merged with Lafarge in 2015 and now represents the company, said last year that it had fired the executives involved in the payments made to IS.
“None of the conduct involved Holcim, which has never operated in Syria, or any Lafarge operations or employees in the United States, and it is in stark contrast with everything that Holcim stands for,” the company said in a statement following the DOJ’s investigation.
