Former Secretary of State and leading Democratic presidential contender, Hillary Clinton, caused waves this past week after noting that “Saudi financing is still a major source of funding for terrorist groups.” Clinton spoke on the matter during a Q-and-A session following a major foreign policy address at the Council for Foreign Relations.

Criticism of Saudi Arabia’s role in funding terrorist groups is nothing new for Clinton. As Wikileaks revealed, while at the State Department, Clinton drafted a memo in which she held that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT (Lashkar-e Taiba) and other terrorist groups.” According to Clinton’s 2009 memo, “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

The issue of terrorist financing has risen to the fore once more following the attacks in Paris two weeks ago. As the Islamic State continues its rampage both within and beyond the Middle East, including the downing of a Russian airliner, bomb attacks in Beirut and Baghdad, and the multi-pronged attack in central Paris, the question of how to limit Islamic State’s access to hard cash has taken on renewed significance.

Not that the issue had been treated mildly before. Last October, then-Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the U.S. Treasury Department, David Cohen, dedicated an entire speech to ISIS’s financing at the Carnegie Endowment. Noting that ISIS’s sources of funding include sales of oil and refined petroleum products, kidnap-for-ransom schemes, extortion rackets, and a “range of other criminal activities,” Cohen also stated that ISIS “maintains important links to financiers in the Gulf…”

ISIS is not alone in receiving external support from Gulf donor networks, either. As Cohen earlier noted at the Center for New American Security in March 2014, “Al-Qa’ida still looks to…deep-pocket donors and charitable organizations…to raise funds.” The “majority of their funds” come from “Gulf-based sympathizers, followed by supporters based in Pakistan and Turkey.” While Saudi Arabia “[had] made great progress in stamping out al-Qa’ida funding sources within its own borders,” Qatar and Kuwait remained troublesome jurisdictions for terrorist financing.

In fact, as Cohen states, “Qatar has become such a permissive terrorist financing environment that several major Qatar-based fundraisers act as local representatives for larger terrorist fundraising networks that are based in Kuwait.” Indeed, U.S. officials have recently said, albeit anonymously, that “the biggest share of individual donations supporting ISIS…comes from Qatar…”

Moreover, Kuwait, according to Cohen, “has become the epicenter of fundraising for terrorist groups in Syria,” with a “number of Kuwaiti fundraisers exploit[ing] the charitable impulses of unwitting donors by soliciting humanitarian donations from both inside and outside the country [and] diverting those funds to extremist groups in Syria.” According to an analysis from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “Arab Gulf donors as a whole…have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Syria in recent years, including to ISIS and other groups.”

Some have well-explained the logistics of this funding. Due to increased measures that Saudi Arabia has taken to limit terrorist financing, most funds to terrorist entities are now processed through Kuwait and Qatar. Typically, both countries will have representatives seeking funds from donor networks in Saudi Arabia. Private Saudi donors will then use Kuwait and Qatar as intermediary jurisdictions for the processing of funds transfers to terrorist entities in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Such troubling developments would have expected a rigorous response from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, including a spate of sanctions designations targeting these Gulf donor networks. Nonetheless, a review of OFAC’s SDN List reveals that such sanctions designations have been minimal. Indeed, a search of SDGT designations in Qatar, for instance, identifies only two individuals and one entity subject to such designation. That entity is Bank Saderat, a major Iranian bank designated for funneling funds to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Similarly, a search of SDGT designations in Kuwait identifies two individuals and two entities.

Considering that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait remain close allies of the United States, these small numbers are not altogether surprising. Instead of designating individuals and entities for sanctions, the Treasury Department has preferred to work with these allied governments to improve their internal policing of terrorist financing. In some cases, such as Saudi Arabia, that tact seems to have worked to an extent. In other cases, such as Kuwait and Qatar, much more obviously needs to be done.

Nonetheless, the incongruence between allegations of Kuwait and Qatar’s role as permissive jurisdictions for terrorist financing and the relative lack of any sanctions designations relating to such financing is a curious feature of OFAC’s current sanctions targeting policies. In light of the renewed attention given to terrorist financing over the past few weeks, one wonders if such policies can be long maintained.