Al-Qaida cash-strapped, losing clout: U.S. official

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 (Xinhua) -- Al-Qaida is cash-strapped and losing its clout thanks to efforts to disrupt terrorist financing, a U.S. official said Monday.

"We assess that al-Qaida is in its weakest financial condition in several years, and that, as a result, its influence is waning," U.S. Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Terrorist Financing David Cohen said at a Washington conference on money laundering, according to wire and Internet news reports.

That is because government and private financial-sector efforts have helped expose and block donor funding to terrorist groups including al-Qaida.

The U.S. government's identification of domestic and foreign terrorism donors and the private financial institutions' willingness to disengage with those donors had cut into the available capital for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, Cohen said.

As a result, in the first half of this year, al-Qaida had publicly appealed for money four times, he noted.

By comparison, the Taliban in Afghanistan was in much better financial shape due to the diversity of its funding resources, including drug trade, weapons trafficking and extortion.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has said that the Taliban's financial strength made it more difficult to be defeated.

Cohen's remarks were made as U.S. President Barack Obama is weighing options on the strategy for the Afghan war, now in its eighth year.

McChrystal and other generals are pressing Obama to send a minimum of 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to change the dynamics of the war.