SOHR:French court accepts charges against cement company for complicity in crimes against humanity by ISIS

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A top court in France on Tuesday said that a French cement company operating in Syria should be investigated on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity for allegedly financing the Islamic State (ISIS) group and other militants during the early years of the civil war in northern Syria.

“The indictment of the company for terrorist financing is confirmed,” the Court of Cassation said in a statement.

Lafarge is accused of financially supporting militias, including ISIS, in order to keep its factory operating during the 2011 conflict in Syria. In 2019, the Paris Court of Appeal dismissed the charge of crimes against humanity saying it has accepted that the payments were not aimed at the terrorist group and its agenda of torture and executions.

However, the company still faced three other charges of financing terrorism, violating a European Union embargo, and endangering the lives of others.

A peaceful uprising against the president of Syria turned into a civil war ten years ago. The conflict has left millions of people dead and displaced. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) documented the deaths of 387,118 people by December 2020, among them 116,911 civilians. Three years later, ISIS seized control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The last of its so-called caliphate was defeated in Syria in 2019, but the group remains a threat on both sides of the border.

Lafarge, which merged with the Swiss group Holcim in 2015, has acknowledged that its Syrian subsidiary paid middlemen to negotiate with armed groups to allow the movement of staff and goods inside the war zone, according to AFP. It has fought to drop this case.

There are scores of companies that are accused of crimes against humanity for their activities in areas of conflict but they are rarely brought to trial