Biden Removing 5 Organizations from Terror Blacklist, Despite Thousands of Deaths
By The Associated Press
May 15, 2022 at 7:15am
The United States is poised to remove five extremist groups, all believed to be defunct, from its list of foreign terrorist organizations — including several that once posed significant threats, killing hundreds if not thousands of people across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Although the groups are inactive, the decision is politically sensitive for the Biden administration and the countries in which the organizations operated and could draw criticism from victims and their families still dealing with the losses of loved ones.
The organizations include the Basque separatist group ETA, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, the radical Jewish group Kahane Kach and two Islamic groups that have been active in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Egypt.
The U.S. State Department notified Congress on Friday of the decision, which comes at the same time as an increasingly divisive but unrelated debate in Washington and elsewhere about whether Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard should or can be legally removed from the U.S. list as part of efforts to salvage the languishing Iran nuclear deal.
That designation, which was imposed by the Trump administration, was not mentioned in Friday’s notifications.