Our understanding of terrorist financing has changed over the past 70 years and that evolution of terrorist financing was presented across Chapters 1– 4. In addition, to place the parallel development of measures to combat the finan¬cing of terrorism in context, the introduction of money laundering as a crime was discussed, along with the establishment of the FATF. An international organization, the FATF was created to understand money laundering and it first produced guidance to help countries combat money laundering in 1990. In 2001 the organization's mandate was expanded to include terrorist finan¬cing, making the FATF the responsible organization for producing international guidance to combat terrorist financing as well. The historical development of both terrorist financing and the regime to counter it provided the background for understanding the contemporary issues impacting the CFT regime that were explored in Chapters 5– 7.

There are several key points to take away from this book regarding the measures used to combat the financing of terrorism. First, there was the initial focus placed on terrorist financing by the US government in 2001. As shown, their claim that terrorist financing is the “lifeblood” of terrorism was a justi¬fication for pre-emptive sanctions. The lifeblood image, however, is a flawed analogy. It implied that it would be possible to prevent future acts of terrorism by freezing assets, preventing fundraising and stopping the transfer of money. The diverse set of terrorist attacks in Europe between 2001 and 2021 demon¬strate that this is not the case. In those attacks the perpetrators variously used their own salaries and savings, took out small bank loans, engaged in petty crime and received contributions from foreign terrorist groups. The CFT measures operating in Europe did not provide advance warning of any of these attacks. Rather, the information gathered by these measures came into use only after the fact to trace the source of financing behind the attack. Following the attacks in Paris in November 2015, for example, the French government identified the use of anonymous prepaid cards by the terrorists and introduced a proposal to regulate them in the future.