UN Security Council Resolution 1373 Imposes Permanent Terror Financing Rules After September 11

In the United States, the September 11, 2001 attacks killed about three thousand people and pushed Washington to launch what came to be known as the War on Terror.

In the international system, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1368 on 12 September 2001 and then, on 28 September, adopted Resolution 1373 unanimously in its 4385th session.

BBC

The 1373 resolution obliges all states to prevent and repress the financing of terrorism, to freeze funds of those who commit or facilitate terrorist acts, and to deny safe haven to those entities.

The same text says the 1373 resolution created the Committee against Terrorism in paragraph 6 and gave states ninety days to report on compliance.

The article also argues that the 1373 model imposed general, abstract, and permanent obligations on all states under Chapter VII, and it cites the article 25 linkage to binding decisions and the article 103 priority rule.

In the United States, Rozina Ali described how her parents told her that “This country is at war, and Muslims attacked this country, and we are all going to be under suspicion.”

Ali said the post-9/11 pattern included law enforcement and FBI agents who “surveilled not just Muslim neighborhoods, but sat in cafes.”

CTech

Pew Research Center data cited in the same coverage show Muslim hate crimes rose from 28 reported incidents in 2000 to 481 in 2001, and later remained higher than pre-9/11 levels with 205 incidents recorded in 2025.

At the University of Pennsylvania, The Daily Pennsylvanian Editorial Board wrote that after 9/11, the federal government initiated “a complete overhaul of its tracking system for student visa holders,” launching an electronic monitoring database for international students.

The editorial board added that the FBI enlisted campus police to monitor communities of Middle Eastern students and that the New York Police Department “poured resources into an investigation of Muslim Student Associations” at Northeast colleges.

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the United States’ counterterrorism capabilities are described as facing renewed scrutiny due to “budgetary pressures, loss of personnel, and competing national security priorities.”

The article says Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University terrorism expert, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the terrorism counterterrorism infrastructure established after 9/11 has been weakened by “budget cuts, the loss of personnel, and the diminishing prominence of the terrorism file among national security priorities.”

It also quotes Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, warning that “There is a degree of fatigue,” as policymakers increasingly focus on other challenges after two decades of the “global war on terror.”

In the same account, the piece says a major strategic shift occurred in 2018 when Washington began focusing more on long-term competition with major powers, especially China and Russia.

The article further reports that for fiscal year 2026, total funding for the major civilian intelligence agencies was about $81 billion, while intelligence experts stress that analyst expertise, institutional knowledge, and clarity of priorities remain crucial.