French firm accused of payments to ISIS during Syrian war

A former employee of cement company Lafarge hopes justice will prevail after France’s Supreme Court ruled the firm faces charges of crimes against humanity for its actions during the Syrian civil war.

Lafarge is accused of paying ISIS and other armed groups €13 million ($14.1 million) to allow it to continue operating in Syria during the war while keeping its Syrian employees on duty and therefore endangering their lives.

Anti-corruption group Sherpa said a criminal investigation revealed Syrian workers may have been at risk of kidnapping, injury and death.

Mohammad is one of 11 former employees of the company’s Syrian subsidiary taking legal action.

Lafarge bought a factory in 2008 in Manbij, north Syria, and told its Syrian employees to relocate. However, the area was soon engulfed in war after an uprising against the regime of Syrian president Bashar Al Assad. Mohammad told The National he began working for Lafarge in 2011, the year the civil war started.

Other French companies, closed their operations in Syria after the EU imposed an arms and oil embargo after the civil war broke out.

However, Lafarge remained and their factory was controlled by Kurdish militia who manned checkpoints that employees had to pass through, Mohammad said.

With Manbij in the hands of its opponents, the city became a target for regime air strikes.

“When they began to evacuate, the expats from the factory raised the question ‘What about the Syrian people?’ and [Lafarge] said, ‘There is no evacuation plan for them’,” Mohammad said.

In 2012, he relocated his wife and daughter to Turkey and then returned to Syria to work. After returning, his neighbourhood was destroyed by an air strike.

“I went to the factory and said, ‘Did you see what happened? What shall I do?’. They said, ‘We cannot protect you’. I told them that if they can’t protect me I can’t remain in Syria, so they fired me.” Mohammed joined his family in Turkey and eventually they moved to Germany.

He said “a lot of people have been kidnapped and disappeared but nobody from Lafarge took any action, so maybe by being part of this case I can be the voice of these people who have disappeared”.

Lafarge faces another lawsuit in the US by Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, one of more than 400 Yazidis who have filed a court case against the company.

They claim it conspired to provide material support to a campaign of terrorism by ISIS against the Yazidi population.