Kurdish immigrants facing prison time - Yahoo! News

Or, an alternate title would be, "US Begins Taking Apart Terrorist Halawa System":

HARRISONBURG, Va. - Rasheed Qambari escaped threats from Saddam Hussein's regime a decade ago and was granted asylum in the United States. [snip]

Qambari was convicted in January of operating an unlicensed money transferring business and is scheduled to be sentenced Monday along with two co-defendants. All three could be deported.

Amir Rashid and Ahmed Abdullah pleaded guilty to the same felony charge, which carries a term of up to five years. A fourth man, Fadhil Noroly, is set to go on trial July 11.

Authorities say the men, who all were granted asylum in the United States, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kurdish provinces in northern Iraq without a business license. Prosecutors would not comment until after the sentencings, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office.

Kurdish immigrants facing prison time - Yahoo! News

While this report makes the men seem very sympathetic and above board, which they may actually be, the Halawa system of unofficial, untrackable money transfers is a mainstay of terrorist financiing and various other illegal transactions such as drug running from the Middle East and Gun Running; all of which contributes to terrorist activities around the world.

As I pointed out in this post on the Hezbollah v. al Qaeda vie for Muslim "charity" money to finance their operations, this money is being transferred through on of three ways:

1) Collected and hand carried in small amounts. Generally amounts that would not cause alarm at border crossings or custom's searches in air ports. This may be part of the Halawa system, but may be the most direct approach if unreliable in terms of trustworthy couriers or couriers that can make it through all of the searches and security.

2) Halawa system.

The unique feature of the system is that no promissory instruments are exchanged between the hawala brokers; the transaction takes place entirely on the honor system. As the system does not depend on the legal enforceability of claims, it can operate even in the absence of a legal and juridical environment. No records are produced of individual transactions; only a running tally of the amount owed one broker by the other is kept. Settlements of debts between hawala brokers can take a variety of forms, and need not take the form of direct cash transactions.

In addition to commissions, hawala brokers often earn their profits through bypassing official exchange rates. Generally the funds enter the system in the source country's currency and leave the system in the recipient country's currency. As settlements often take place without any foreign exchange transactions, they can be made at (black) market rates rather than official rates.[snip]

Furthermore, the transfers are informal and not effectively regulated by governments, which is a major advantage to customers with tax, currency control, immigration, or other legal concerns. For the same reasons, governments disfavor the system, and accusations have been made in recent years that terrorist funding often changes hands through hawala networks.

3) Through legal banking transactions as discussed in the recent outing of the SWIFT investigations that can be read about here, here and here,

In short, the US is going after every aspect of the financing system for terroris. Even if these men are honest, upright citizens who have no connections or sympathies with terrorist organizations, who they deal with, who uses their systems, without a formal process for backgroud checks or following transactions, means that even their "honest" transactions present a danger to the US and an ability for terrorists to continue to act.