US President Joe Biden is moving to split the use the Afghan central bank’s assets to fund needs in Afghanistan amid a humanitarian disaster, and compensate victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Biden is starting to clear a legal path for relatives of the attack victims to pursue $3.5 billion that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York before the Taliban takeover.
The move is also seeking to steer a roughly equal amount toward spending to aid the Afghan people.
Breaking/exclusive: Biden to issue an executive order blocking $7 billion in Afghan central bank funds under his emergency powers — & tell a court 9/11 victims can get half while steering the rest to humanitarian relief etc spending for the Afghan people. https://t.co/xhAv7AdSgN
— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) February 11, 2022
Biden issued an executive order Friday morning invoking emergency powers to consolidate and freeze all $7 billion of the total assets the Afghan central bank kept in New York.
Beginning the process, the US government would ask a judge for permission to move $3.5 billion to a trust fund it would set up to support the needs of the Afghan people, like for humanitarian relief.
The New York Times reported that the highly unusual set of moves is meant to address a tangled knot of legal, political, foreign policy and humanitarian problems stemming from the attacks and the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
Following the dissolution of Afghan government dissolved in August, which resulted in the fleeing of its top officials, including its president and the acting governor of its central bank, it left behind slightly more than $7 billion in central bank assets on deposit at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.
