A leading corporation funding ISIS? That's what the reputable newspaper Le Monde found in an investigation published a month ago. Lafarge, a French multinational with major operations in the United States and U.S. headquarters in Chicago, is accused of having collaborated with the terrorist organization.

The news will likely send shivers down your spine… the cement giant, far from being impeded by the civil war that has tearing Syria apart since 2011, has done all in its power to keep the business up and running in Jalabiya, northern Syria… including paying taxes to ISIS to use its roads. That's completely scandalous!

It’s simply unacceptable that Lafarge be cutting deals with terrorist groups just to expand its operations. Lafarge needs to be held accountable for being complicit in ISIS’s violence, which has impacted so many civilians around the world.

We need to make sure that this news doesn’t get buried and forgotten. We need to bring together as many as we can to demand the truth and firm resolutions against this morbid sort of funding.

Sign the petition to tell the Department of Justice to launch an investigation of Lafarge's payments to ISIS.

Lafarge's arrangements are certainly shocking in the face of the Syrian reality. According to Le Monde's investigation, the cement maker paid taxes to ISIS between 2013 and 2014 via its plant in Jalabiya, northern Syria, valued at 600 million euros. Why? Corporate greed: the company wanted to keep on doing business no matter what and take advantage, so it seems, of the hike in cement prices in this war-torn area.

Even worse! The bosses at Lafarge knew about this “murky and dangerous game” played with a terrorist organization responsible for so many massacres and attacks throughout the world. Internal mails have revealed that the top cement maker also didn't shy away from buying raw materials from local businesses, themselves taxed by ISIS. Talking about fuel, one employee explained: “It's impossible, without fuel, to heat the precalciner and the rotary kiln to such temperatures. Lafarge had no other choice but to buy oil from ISIS, which at the moment controlled all production sources in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.”

In fact, Lafarge did have a choice! The company should have suspended its operations and not taken part, in any way, shape or form, in a bloody war and in funding a terrorist organization.

Tell the Department of Justice to investigate Lafarge for paying off the terrorist group to do business in Syria.

This is not the first time that a French company is implicated in terrorism funding. In December 2015, 66 Al-Qaeda victims pressed charges against BNP for its involvement in the funding of the Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam attacks in 1998. Previously, in 2014, an American court inflicted a record-breaking 9-billion-dollar fine on the French bank for breaching the embargo on Sudan and dealing with a country accused of harbouring international terrorism.

Lafarge could suffer the same fate. We cannot tolerate that financial interests supersede the respecting of lives, dignity and justice!

Corporations should not be above the law, especially when it comes to terrorism. Sign the petition to make sure an investigation is launched in the US.