• With prepaid cards and fraud, the sky’s the limit… more>>

• Sick of drug money funding terrorism? Plant science has developed to the point where we could eradicate the coca shrub and opium poppy, if we really wanted to… more>>

• Sanctions violation:  the president of Panama’s private trading company is shipping 20 containers a month to Iran… more>>

The drugs probably originated from Afghanistan with the Taliban or the Haqqani network involved in the supply chain, including a 10 pe.  The commanding officer of the warship Toronto noted that “Every dollar we deny these terrorist organizations works toward making our world a safer place.”

From the National Post on June 6:

Canadian warship HMCS Toronto seizes six tonnes of hashish in counter-terror operation

The Royal Canadian Navy ship HMCS Toronto seized six tonnes of hashish in its largest narcotics bust to date since beginning counter-terror operations in the Arabian Sea, the Department of National Defence says.

The Toronto‘s crew made the discovery during an inspection of a ship on May 30th and DND says the hashish was recovered and destroyed without incident.

DND did not provide specific details on the raid but provided photos showing armed sailors in bullet-proof vests and helmets on board the small vessel.

It was the largest hashish seizure in the history of the 29-nation member Combined Maritime Forces, coming not long after a massive heroin bust by the same ship.

To date, Toronto has seized more than 7.3 tonnes of narcotics since March, representing hundreds of millions of dollars in street value, DND says.

“I am extremely proud of the high level of proficiency and tenacity that my crew has shown on this deployment. The outstanding work of all onboard has contributed to these record narcotics seizures,” said Commander Jeff Hamilton, Commanding Officer of HMCS Toronto…

The Globe & Mail notes that “The six tonnes of cannabis resin are the largest hashish seizure in the history of the combined maritime forces.”

Such aid includes funds raised in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.A.E., the Sudan, and Islamic charities operating in the West (see here, here, here and here) transmitting donations through third party or shell charities in Gaza.  In terms of annual revenues, Hamas is one of the five wealthiest terrorist organizations worldwide.

Hamas ‘surviving’ without Iranian aid

Islamist group’s departure from the ‘Axis of Resistence’ did not hasten reconciliation with Fatah

By Nasouh Nazzal Correspondent
June 4, 2013

Ramallah: Healing the internal Palestinian rift seems to be unachievable despite the impact of the serious reduction in Iranian financial aid to Hamas and the departure of the Islamist group’s headquarters out of Syria.

The latest issue of contention between Hamas and Fatah is Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s move to appoint a new prime minister to fill the vacuum left with the resignation of caretaker premier Salam Fayyad.

Hamas rulers in Gaza pay the salaries of 50,000 workers and troops, which presents a financial hardship for the Islamist group similar to that faced by the Ramallah-based Palestinian National Authority.

“Hamas can handle the financial difficulties and compensate for the Iranian financial aid with a strict tax system, the tunnel trade, and financial aid from some Arab states,” said Hani Habib, a Gaza-based commentator and political analyst in an interview with Gulf News.

Western financial aid for the PNA is not unlike Iranian financial aid to Hamas, and is often connected to the political agendas of the donors, he said.

Iran had dramatically reduced its financial aid to Hamas after the Islamist group refused to support the Syrian regime led by Bashar Al Assad. “This Iranian attitude had basically disclosed that the Axis of Resistance connects the financial aid to loyalty,” said Habib, referring to the term used to refer to Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Syrian regime’s enmity to Israel.

Palestinian observers had expected that an end of Iranian financial aid to Hamas would facilitate a healing of the internal rift between the two rivals, Fatah and Hamas.

“This is an illusion as Hamas does not suffer a serious financial difficulty,” said Habib.

“It has become clear that Palestinian internal reconciliation is not connected with the Iranian financial aid to Hamas.”

The Islamist group of Hamas is no longer confronting with the Israeli occupation forces in the field, a stance which resulted in deterioration in the support of the Muslim world, according to Dr Ebrahim Ebrashi, who heads the Political Science Department at Al Azhar University in Gaza and is the former Palestinian Culture Minister.

“Hamas has become an authority and government which held a truce with Israel,” he said.

Ebrashi believes that Palestinian internal reconciliation is a bigger issue than Fatah and Hamas.

“Reconciliation has to do with geography which is totally and solely controlled by Israel,” he told Gulf News. “Palestinians should not dream of forming a national unity government this August.”

Hamas has moved from the arena of resistance to the arena of politics and that shift in Hamas strategy includes losses that Hamas must bear.

“It is true that Hamas has lost the Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah support, but Hamas’ leadership in Gaza and abroad believe that they can make it up,” he said…

One memo, translated from Farsi, instructs “The CBI and IRGC to prepare an urgent plan for an orderly transfer of responsibility for running the entire banking system to the IRGC.”

Another document entitled “Operational Measures to Combat the Country’s Economic Crisis” calls for the “drafting of an emergency plan for transferring the country’s banking system to the IRGC.”

The website Vocativ has described mounting problems with Iran’s banking system and these leaked documents and makes some helpful observations, but erroneously describes the proposed transfer of power from the CBI to the IRGC as a contingency plan in the event of civil unrest.  The memoranda, if true, actually instruct the CBI and IRGC to plan for the transfer as a necessary step in the implementation of drastic new measures that Iran will adopt to save its crumbling economy.  Time will tell if the documents are forgeries or real.

Thanks to El Grillo for sending this in.

How the jizya collections have been spent was not discussed, but such revenues are normally used by jihadists to buy more weapons and supplies.  Under classical Islamic tax law, money collected from jizya and kharaj taxation is used to provision the army of the caliphate.

Eventually, the jizya demands in northern Syria increased to the point where Christian residents could no longer pay—they eventually fled or were murdered for non-payment, with only three of 30 families from one village reportedly surviving.

From a translation by Dr. Mark Durie of the Religious Freedom Coalition (h/t IvE) on June 1:

…My interlocutors this evening were almost all from northern Syria. They came from Idlib, Aleppo and villages in the countryside between the two cities. Their testimony was unanimous. Many of these villages had a large Christian presence until a few years ago, but now Christians no longer lived there. Jamil, an elderly man, told the following story during which other attendees began to nod violently in agreement. They appeared to have experienced exactly the same things.

Jamil lived in a village near Idlib where 30 Christian families had always lived peacefully alonside some 200 Sunni families. That changed dramatically in the summer of 2012. One Friday trucks appeared in the village with heavily armed and bearded strangers who did not know anyone in the village. They began to drive through the village with a loud speaker broadcasting the message that their village was now part of an Islamic emirate and Muslim women were henceforth to dress in accordance with the provisions of the Islamic Sharia. Christians were given four choices. They could convert to Islam and renounce their “idolatry”. If they refused they were allowed to remain on condition that they pay the jizya. This is a special tax that non-Muslims under Islamic law must pay for “protection”. For Christians who refused there remained two choices: they could leave behind all their property or they would be slain. The word that was used for the latter in Arabic (dhabaha) refers to the ritual slaughter of sacrificial animals.

After Jamil had finished his story a gloomy silence descended. I asked him how the 30 Christian families in his village had perished since then. He replied that a number of families – including his own family – had initially opted to pay jizya. When the leader of the armed militia in their village, however, noticed that they were able to do this, the amount kept increasing in the following months. Like almost all other Christian families he eventually fled the village. His land and farm were lost. Some Christian families in his village who were unable to escape or pay the jizya converted to Islam. To his knowledge, there were no Christians killed in his village, but he had heard other stories from a neighboring village where only three Christian families survived. They were all murdered in the middle of the night…

Thanks to Gisele, David, Sal, and El Grillo for sending this in:

Jonathan Manthorpe: Saudi Arabia funding fuels jihadist terror

Big chunks of the country’s huge oil earnings have been spent on spreading a violent and intolerant variety of Islam

By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun columnist May 28, 2013

The ultimate responsibility for recent atrocities like the Boston Marathon bombing and the butchering last week of an off-duty British soldier is very clear.

It belongs to Saudi Arabia.

Over more than two decades, Saudi Arabia has lavished around $100 billion or more on the worldwide promotion of the violent, intolerant and crudely puritanical Wahhabist sect of Islam that the ruling royal family espouses.

The links of the Boston bombers and the London butchers to organizations following the Saudi royal family’s religious line are clear.

One of the two London butchers, Nigerian-born Michael Adebolajo, was radicalized by the cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, who headed the outlawed terrorist group Al-Muhajiroun.

The group follows Wahhabist teachings and advocates unifying all Muslims, forcibly if necessary, under a single fundamentalist theocratic government.

Similarly, the Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, hailed from Russia’s southern predominantly Muslim province of Chechnya. Starting in the late 1980s, Saudi Arabia began dispatching Wahhabist clerics and radical preachers to Chechnya.

The spread of Wahhabism sparked not only a separatist war against the Russians, but also a good deal of violence among Muslims.

Wahhabism is now institutionalized in Chechnya and is particularly attractive to young men.

There are similar strands leading back to Wahhabist indoctrination in the histories of very many of the known Muslim terrorists of the last 20 years.

The founder of the sect, Muhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab, was an eighteenth century Muslim zealot allied to the Al-Saud clan who promoted an extreme version of Salafism.

Salaf is the Arab word meaning pious ancestor and refers to those who attempt to emulate the pure Islamic life of the Prophet Muhammad and his generation of followers.

But Wahhab and his modern disciples take this notion to extremes. The list of people whom Wahhabists should consider their enemies includes not only Christians, Jews, Hindus and atheists, but also Shiite, Sufi and Sunni Muslims.

And yet no western politicians seem prepared to accept the obvious.

The chances of disaffected young men being drawn into the evil web of Wahhabist murderous extremism would be significantly decreased if the Saudi funding was blocked.

The Saudis began exporting Wahhabism in the early 1970s when the country’s oil wealth began growing at an ever-increasing rate.

The amount the Saudi royal family, both by government donations and the generosity of individual princes, now lavishes on Wahhabist schools, colleges, mosques, Islamic centres and the missionary work of fundamentalist imams around the world is extraordinary.

In 2003, a United States Senate committee on terrorism heard testimony that in the previous 20 years Saudi Arabia had spent $87 billion on promoting Wahhabism worldwide.

This included financing 210 Islamic centres, 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges and 2,000 madrassas (religious schools).

Various estimates put the amount the Saudi government spends on these missionary institutions as up to $3 billion a year.

This money smothers the voices of moderate Muslims and the poison flows into every Muslim community worldwide.

Key figures in the September 2001 attacks on the United States were radicalized at mosques in Germany.

Britain is now reckoned by some to be the worst breeding ground anywhere for violent Muslim fundamentalists

Indian newspapers recently reported Saudi Arabia has a massive $35 billion program to build mosques and religious schools across South Asia, where there are major Muslim communities in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the divided territory of Jammu and Kashmir…

There is more—read the rest here.

While most readers will agree with Manthorpe’s statement that “Wahhabist murderous extremism would be significantly decreased if the Saudi funding was blocked,” they may be wondering how to accomplish a block.

Consider that the Indonesian and Philippine branches of the Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization were once designated by the U.S. as terrorist entities, but the parent organization itself has never been sanctioned.  The Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth have never been named either, although their role in financing and fanning the flames of global jihad are clear to anybody paying attention.

At a minimum, these organizations, which are quasi-governmental foundations with direct backing of the Saudi government, should be designated in the same fashion that other Islamist charities and banks have been sanctioned by the U.S. elsewhere.

Lebanese businessmen, front groups, and khums donors who aid Hezbollah are seldom investigated because the EU does not consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization.

Fortunately, Tablet Magazine is looking into issue, and offered this informative article on June 4.  An excerpt follows:

…What Europe should really be worried about is the group’s European business empire and its ramifications for the continent.

Lebanese Shiite communities in Europe provide good recruiting pools for the Party of God and often donate money to Hezbollah-sponsored charities that raise funds for social causes in Lebanon. Businessmen affiliated with Hezbollah also set up façade companies in countries with lax legislation and weak and corrupt governments and then transfer their funds to respectable European accounts. The latter are more important to the Lebanese group. Technically abiding by the European laws and keeping a low profile, they make most of the money the group needs to finance not only its military program but also the schools, hospitals, and community activities meant to secure the group’s popular base inside Lebanon.

According to Lebanese University professor Hares Suleiman, Hezbollah started building its business empire in 2001-2002, following the example of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which had set up networks of companies in the Gulf. “Hezbollah started contacting businessmen and building partnerships, increasing its capital and investing in hotels, the car trade, clothes manufacturing, and wholesale,” he said. “At the same time, Hezbollah members and supporters—who were not businessmen to start with—opened new businesses, investments, and institutions in Lebanon and abroad, in places such as Africa and the Gulf. After the 2006 July War, the phenomenon increased,” he pointed out.

The change was obvious in South Lebanon, where castle-like villas sprang up out of nowhere after the July 2006 war. Most locals would give you the official line of the party they support: They built their villas to show how fast the Lebanese resistance could regenerate after the war with Israel. In the town of Kherbet Selem, where Hezbollah controls the local council, the mayor’s relatives built an actual castle with the Brazilian flag on top—a clue to the source of the money, in Hezbollah’s burgeoning South American business empire—and Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah’s pictures lining the walls.

Most of the money channeled toward South Lebanon’s villages comes from Latin America and West Africa, where most of Hezbollah’s businesses are located. But informed sources say that even some of that money makes stops in Europe-based accounts belonging to financiers and is then laundered through European-based sister companies so it doesn’t attract too much attention.

Lebanese Shiite communities of Hezbollah supporters in Europe also raise funds for the Party of God through donations made to charities. Germany has a large community of Hezbollah supporters that has grown considerably during the past decade. German media reported in 2007 that 900 Hezbollah activists were in the country and that they regularly meet in 30 cultural community centers and mosques. These activists financially supported Hezbollah in Lebanon through fundraising organizations, such as the “Orphans Project Lebanon Association.” Funds donated to that association were then transferred to Hezbollah’s Al Shahid Association, which supports the families of the Party of God’s military personnel who are killed in action.

Sweden also hosts a strong community of Hezbollah supporters, which it allows to operate freely in the country. Several rallies organized by the party’s supporters had quite a considerable turnout in the country’s main cities and were supported by Sweden’s left-wing opposition parties. In the last year two Lebanese-Swedish men were arrested in separate instances for trying to plan attacks on Israelis in Bangkok and Cyprus. Hezbollah has also done public fundraising in other EU countries such as Denmark.

But the European authorities and law-enforcement agencies often do not look into Hezbollah’s fundraising activities, or into businesses that might have links to Hezbollah, because they are not seen as a threat to public security in Europe—no matter how clear the links are to organizations that sponsor violence elsewhere…

Al-Qaeda turns to highway robbery

Yemen Post Staff • May 1, 2013

Local officials in al-Baydha province, south-east of the capital, Sana’a, confirmed this Wednesday morning that armed men suspected to have links with al-Qaeda had attacked a car convoy which was containing $2 million worth in salaries.

The convoy which was heavily guarded by soldiers was ambushed on Tuesday as it was making its delivery to a local post office. Two soldiers were killed in the shoot out alongside two post office workers who tried to intervene.

“Three al-Qaeda operatives killed two soldiers and two post office workers. The terrorists aimed to still government funds,” said a local official to the press.

However, due to the fast response of the military and the security serviced the terror militants were unable to flee with the money, only barely escaping themselves. They all are believed to have fled back to the mountains.

Police officers have already been dispatched to track them down and arrange for their arrest.

“The perpetrators were not able to complete their operation … and fled to the White Mountains, the police is now tracking them down.”

Similar attempted heists have somewhat of a recurrence in Yemen southern provinces as al-Qaeda operatives are turning to highway robbery to finance their operations, while disrupting civilian life.

Despite the mobilization in the region of the armed forces al-Qaeda militants remain elusive, having reverted to guerrilla tactics to destabilize the state and spread insecurity in Yemen most vulnerable and restive areas.

Canada told the Eritrean consulate in Toronto to stop the tax collections last year.  The consulate agreed in writing, but CBC reports that the Eritrean consul is still personally soliciting tax payments.

In an article accompanying the video report, CBC offers further detail:

…The regime relies on diaspora cash for hard currency. But according to the UN, it also uses its money to support armed rebels opposing Ethiopia, and others with ties to the notorious al-Shabaab movement in Somalia.

Because of Eritrea’s destabilizing role in the troubled Horn of Africa, the UN imposed sanctions on the country in 2009, hoping to choke off its access to arms and money.

Canada later adopted them, meaning those who pay are violating UN sanctions and may also be breaking Canadian law according to past reports.

Through it all, the consul has not been shy about his country’s intention to keep collecting cash no matter how Canada views it…

Cricket bowler and defendant S. Sreesanth

In what is being called a “sensational twist,” three cricket players including former Rajasthan Royal bowler Shanthakumaran Sreesanth have been charged in a match fixing conspiracy reporting to Dawood Ibrahim, the international terror financier and mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed hundreds of civilians.  The direct ties between the athletes and Dawood were previously unknown.

Rediff News notes that, Dawood was “No. 3 on the Forbes’ World’s Top 10 most dreaded criminals list of 2011.”  Seventeen other cricketers have been arrested, although their ties Dawood are less clear at this point.  Sreesanth and his conspirators will be prosecuted under India’s laws against organized crime.

IPL spot-fixing: Dawood, Chhota Shakeel are suspects, say sources

CNN-IBN | Updated Jun 04

New Delhi: Sources in the Delhi Police on Tuesday said that underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and his close aide Chhota Shakeel are suspects in the IPL spot-fixing case.

In a sensational twist to the scandal, Delhi Police said that Sreesanth and two players were acting at the “command” of the underworld don and his aide, among India’s most wanted, as it invoked the stringent MCOCA against 23 accused in the case.

Police claimed it has “concrete” evidence like intercepted telephonic conversations to link Sreesanth and some others with D-company.

Under MCOCA, the accused face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment along with fine of Rs five lakh. Police’s disclosure came in a court which extended till June 18 the judicial custody of Sreesanth and 22 others against whom Maharasthra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) was invoked. A total of 26 people have been arrested by Delhi Police since May 16 in the case.

“Since the accused persons were acting on command of people based abroad like Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar and Chhota Shakeel who have a continuous past record of organised crimes, provisions of MCOCA have been invoked against the accused,” police told Additional Sessions Judge Sanjiv Jain.

The court, in its order, referred to the approval granted by Joint Commissioner of Police Special Cell for invoking section 3 and 4 of MCOCA and also a report citing reasons for the same.

“It has been stated that the approval for invoking MCOCA has been accorded by Joint CP (Special Cell) on the premise that the arrested persons/accused through extensive use of electronic and via media were in communication with each other and with their other associates, who are still absconding, including those associates who are based abroad.

“The illegal organised betting syndicate in India is being controlled by persons based abroad”…