An “industry of fake passports” has been established by the Islamic State terror group and must be investigated by international authorities, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters Monday.
Speaking at a meeting of interior ministers in Amsterdam, Mr. Cazeneuve urged the European Union to create a specialized task force in order tackle an apparent racket which may be allowing members of the terror group to sneak across borders using false identities.
“Daesh has managed to seize passports in Iraq, Syria and Libya and to set up a true industry of fake passports,” Mr. Cazeneuve said, using the Arabic acronym for the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
To counter the group’s operations, Mr. Cazeneuve said Europol, the Hague-based law enforcement branch of the EU, should create a task force that would upload information pertaining to passports used by suspected terrorists to a database that could then be accessed across the bloc.
“The problem is not national but European and global,” Mr. Cazeneuve said.
The interior minister’s claim comes hardly a month after a U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Intelligence Report suggested that the Islamic State may have been able to print legitimate-looking Syrian passports after raiding an office in the city of Deir ez-Zour last summer that held “boxes of blank passports” and a printing machine. U.S. intelligence has also said that the terror group may have gained access to a passport office after taken hold of Raqqa, Syria, its de facto capital.
“Since more than 17 months [have] passed since Raqqa and Deir ez-Zour fell to ISIS, it is possible that individuals from Syria with passports ’issued’ in these ISIS controlled cities or who had passport blanks, may have traveled to the U.S.,” the report read.
“The intelligence community is concerned that [the Islamic State] have the ability, the capability to manufacture fraudulent passports, which is a concern in any setting,” FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers during a congressional hearing last month.
Authorities believe that at least two of the perpetrators of the terror attacks in Paris last year used Syrian passports and posed as refugees to travel to France by way of Greece. Nikos Toskas, Greece’s deputy interior minister, acknowledged during a separate news conference Monday that border officials are struggling to stop individuals from entering with forged documents.
“We are checking these people, as proved by the Paris perpetrators. When French authorities asked us to check their identity, we found the data and passed it on immediately,” Mr. Toskas said. “But on the issue of fake documents, many are sold on Middle East markets and we know how difficult it is to identify them with good machines, in calm conditions, not when you have 4,000 arriving in a day.”
Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, said his agency is committed to “helping member states in this unprecedented migration crisis, in particular in regards to organized crime, where the provision of fake documents is a key part of criminal activity,” noting a “considerable improvement in the level of intelligence exchanged” across the EU since the Paris attacks, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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