Hezbollah agent arrested in Atlanta

Hezbollah is brazen, organized, and among us.  They are sponsored directly by Shia fundamentalists in Iran.  They exploit Western free markets to fund Iranian terrorism.

From Reuters.  Hat tip to El Grillo:

Two alleged Hezbollah associates face US arms, money laundering charges

NEW YORK: Two Beirut residents have been arrested on U.S. charges that they took part in an alleged scheme to help Hezbollah launder drug money, and to funnel thousands of weapons and military parts to criminal groups in Lebanon and Iran, prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York, said on Friday.

Iman Kobeissi, 50, was arraigned in Brooklyn on Friday and held without bail, following her arrest a day earlier in Atlanta on charges of conspiring to commit money laundering and conspiring to deal in unlicensed firearms.

The other defendant, Joseph Asmar, 42, was arrested in Paris on a U.S. warrant and charged with money laundering conspiracy…

Lebanese gun smuggler busted in Michigan

He hid guns and gun parts in Porsches. From Fox 17 in West Michigan:

Grand Rapids man arrested, suspected of smuggling guns to Lebanon

Posted 2:19 PM, July 29, 2015, by Bob Brenzing

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A Grand Rapids man has been charged in federal court for smuggling handguns overseas to Lebanon, some of which were hidden in parts of disassembled Porsches.

Gilbert Oscar Elian, who also has a residence in Lebanon, purchased 93 handguns between January of 2012 and May of 2014 at local retailers, including Cabela’s and Silver Bullet, according to court documents.

Elian told a Grand Rapids Police detective and an officer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in an interview that he had taken about 65 of the guns to his residence in Lebanon.  Each of the guns was properly checked in with TSA on flights that Elian made to Lebanon.

Elian did not have an export license for the firearms, but he told agents that he was unaware that he needed one.  Elian told agents earlier that he was an owner of Prestige Imports in Grand Rapids and that he imports and exports auto parts, specifically Porsche parts.  The owner of Prestige Imports tells FOX 17 that Elian had no association with Prestige.

In June of 2015, U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Chesapeake, Virginia inspected a shipping container heading to Lebanon, which was listed as being shipped by Elian.  Because of the earlier investigation into Elian’s activities with guns and Lebanon, agents searched the container.  The officers reported that in the oil pans of the Porsche engines that were inside the shipping container, they found disassembled handguns packed in felt and plastic.

Investigators say they found 20 disassembled handguns and 23 gun magazines in the Porsche engines.  One of the guns allegedly was registered to Elian and another was unregistered…

Report: Clinton OK’d gunrunning through Qatar

A former superior court judge says that Hillary Clinton approved an arms deal to send weapons to rebels in Libya and Syria through Qatari middlemen when she was secretary of state.  Those weapons often ended up in the hands of Islamic radicals and even groups designated by the U.S. as terrorist organizations according to documents reviewed by the judge.  From Fox News Insider on Jul. 2 (with a hat tip to Zadok Forgeron):

Judge Andrew Napolitano revealed this morning what he has concluded after reviewing hundreds of pages of documents and emails related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The judge wrote today in a Washington Times column that the documents “persuaded me beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that Mrs. Clinton provided material assistance to terrorists and lied to Congress.”

Napolitano said he looked at transcripts from a Fox News interview with an American arms dealer named Marc Turi, in addition to reviewing emails between Turi, State Department officials and lawmakers.

On Fox Business Network this morning, the judge told Charles Payne that he believes a “conspiracy existed” among President Obama, Mrs. Clinton, congressional leaders and other officials to “get arms shipped to rebels in Syria and Libya.”

Napolitano said some of the rebel groups were on the United States’ list of terrorist organizations, so providing “material assistance” to them would be a felony.

Napolitano said arms dealers received permission lawfully from the State Department to sell the weapons to the government of Qatar.

“Qatar then sold, delivered, bartered or gave these arms to the terrorist organizations with the consent of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” he said, adding that it is “crystal clear” from the documents that U.S. officials knew where the weapons would end up…

Suggested reading: You can’t afford to play dumb

• The financial crime chief at Istanbul P.D. says Erdogan sheltered an Al Qaeda financier… more>>

• Pizza businessman Kamran Malik pleads guilty to shipping rifles and rifle parts to Pakistan without a license… more>>

• Before a U.S. company acquires a foreign business, it should follow this helpful pre-acquisition due diligence checklist… more>>

• If a country is always in the news along with phrases like “dragged through the street” or “human shield” you might want to do some screening before taking on business partners there… more>>

Taliban arms dealer released from Guantanamo

Mohammed Zahir

Taliban weapons trafficker and drug smuggler Mohammed Zahir has been released from his Guantanamo jail cell back to freedom in Afghanistan by the Obama administration. Described by the Telegraph as “a leading Taliban weapons supplier,” Zahir reportedly had Stinger missiles and uranium on his property in Afghanistan prior to his arrest years ago. Zahir intended to use the uranium to produce an “atom bomb,” earning him a designation by Daniel Greenfield as a “nuclear terrorist.” In any case, the release of this major arms trafficker who can now revive his old gunrunning network would not, to put it politely, enhance security in Afghanistan; nor would it align with Pres. Obama’s professed support for gun control.

Claim: Somali remittance firm bought bombs, suicide vests (updated)

(Updated 12/9/12 to include a response from Dahabshiil)

The Somali news outlet Waagacusub claims that a shipment of bombs, suicide vests, military uniforms and combat boots to the financial services company Dahabshiil has been intercepted. The container was transported by a United Arab Emirates vessel, but Emirati security forces say the container originated in China. The shipment was allegedly intended for delivery to Dahabshiil’s office in Mogadishu, which Dahabshiil denies.  Suicide bomber attacks by al-Shabaab fighters are common in and around Mogadishu.

The allegations against the notorious remittance company could not be independently substantiated by Money Jihad. However, there are some indirect suggestions of potential Dahabshiil involvement in brokering illegal arms deals. In 2013, Inter Press Service reported that weapons are being trafficked in a similar manner as hawala—in other words, arms are being transferred to different owners without being physically moved. The IPS report featured a photograph of Dahabshiil’s Mogadishu office. Waagacusub has previously videotaped witnesses who said that Dahabshiil is involved in the procurement of weapons and vehicles for use in clan warfare. UN investigators recently disclosed that as many as 70 to 80 percent of weapons shipped to Somalia intended for use by the government have been “diverted” for resale in the public marketplace.

Dahabshiil denies involvement in UAE shipment, telling Money Jihad that “Dahabshiil strongly refutes the allegations that it was in any way involved in this incident. Dahabshiil has no involvement whatsoever with the weapons trade.”

Dahabshiil routinely makes payments to the terrorist group al-Shabaab according to reports from multiple Somali news sources, although Dahabshiil denies the charge. Its offices have previously been closed when Dahabshiil has failed to pay or delayed payment. The British bank Barclays is severing ties with Dahabshiil over concerns about money laundering and terrorist financing. Dahabshiil offices in Denmark were recently referred to the police after financial regulators there determined that the remittance company’s offices compliance programs were “completely inadequate.” At least one Dahabshiil branch was found by a Guantanamo military judge to have financed al-Shabaab.

© Text copyrighted 2014 by Money Jihad. Blog URL: moneyjihad.wordpress.com. Any unauthorized reproduction, duplication, or retransmission of this post without the express written consent from Money Jihad is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used provided that full and clear credit is given to Money Jihad with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Boko Haram gun-running in Cameroon

Boko Haram is trafficking arms in far northern Cameroon, according to military officials and news sources. An arms seizure led to at least one arrest in January, and a gendarme raid in the central market of Maroua, the regional capital, led to the arrest of 40 suspects connected with trafficking arms for the jihadist group in June.  Weapons and their proceeds are used in Boko Haram strongholds in northeastern Nigeria of Yobe and Borno.

Furthermore, Cameroon is being exploited by Chadian, Libyan, and Qatari networks to smuggle weapons on Boko Haram’s behalf according to a recent and informative report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point by Jacob Zenn with internal citations omitted (h/t El Grillo):

…The tie between arms traffickers and Boko Haram commanders was also highlighted in key arrests in Cameroon. One Chadian weapons trafficker was arrested in Waza [Cameroon] in June 2014 working on behalf of a Maroua-based Boko Haram commander and possessed $15,000 from deals that he made in Chad. Days before his arrest, Cameroon uncovered weapons stockpiles in Maroua’s central market. In addition, in June 2014, Cameroon discovered travel documents from Libya (Africa’s largest arms market since 2011) and Qatar and receipts from car exports to Qatar in a Boko Haram camp, which suggests a possible link to Alhaji Abdalla, who was Boko Haram’s negotiator in the [kidnapping of the French family] Moulin-Fournier and other kidnappings…

Somalia interdicts shipload of bombs and guns

First time for everything. Thanks to a UN resolution authorizing searches and seizures of ships by Somali security forces, one fewer Gulf-backed arms shipment is making its way into the arsenals of al-Shabaab. The resolution will also make it somewhat harder for al-Shabaab to profit from the illegal export of charcoal from Somalia into the ports of the Arabian peninsula.  From Sabahi Online (hat tip to Chris for sending this in):

Tightened security off Somalia’s coast aims to bankrupt al-Shabaab

The recent seizure of an illegal arms shipment off the Somali coast signals the government’s increasing ability to manage maritime security, analysts say, but it also highlights the need for more effective ways to degrade al-Shabaab’s access to weapons and money.

Somali security forces seized a shipping container filled with weapons and explosives October 28th, just days after the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorising the inspection and seizure of vessels in Somali waters suspected of carrying prohibited items.

Under the resolution, states and regional partners can search ships in Somalia’s territorial waters and on the high seas when there are “reasonable grounds” to suspect they are transporting illegal arms or charcoal, a key source of funding for al-Shabaab militants.

Despite an international ban on charcoal exports, the illegal trade has increased, with al-Shabaab holding on to approximately one-third of the $250 million annual trade, according to a report by the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea released in June.

“Charcoal is giving Al-Shabaab a lifeline,” said British Ambassador to the United Nations Mark Lyall Grant after the resolution passed October 24th.

Grant said Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had written to the Security Council October 8th, requesting assistance. “Today we have responded to that call for help,” he said in a press statement, stressing that the fight against al-Shabaab was at the heart of the resolution.
Resolution provides welcomed support to Somali security agencies

Somalia’s security apparatus is not yet capable of monitoring and controlling all maritime traffic to the ports under its control and could use the help from its international partners, said retired Colonel Sharif Hussein Robow, a former intelligence officer during the Mohamed Siad Barre regime.

Robow praised the government for seizing the container of contraband weapons and explosives at Mogadishu Port last month, but said there are many more shipments carrying prohibited items that fall through the cracks.

“The entry of these types of weapons and everything else that is illegal in a country depends on the government’s capacity [to stop it],” he said.

Currently, security at Somalia’s ports is weak because personnel are not properly trained and officers lack motivation because they are not paid regularly and lack strong supervision, Robow said.

Nonetheless, the UN resolution will help Somalia’s international partners stop the flow of illegal weapons into Somali ports, he said. It can also help stop the export of charcoal, a key source of revenue for al-Shabaab.

“One of the ways [al-Shabaab] gets money includes collecting taxes from traders who bring charcoal from the forest,” he said. “The second way is they could actually own the charcoal that is being exported, and third, they extort money from the big businesses in the charcoal trade.”

Daud Abdi Daud, secretary general of Somali Media for Environment, Science, Health and Agriculture, a non-profit organisation that aims to expand and improve media coverage of key issues from climate change to civil insecurity, said he welcomed inspections carried out by international partners off the coast of Somalia.

“Taking such a step to stop Somali charcoal exports is a good thing because this issue poses a big problem for both the Somali people and the environment,” Daud told Sabahi. “Cutting [trees for] charcoal has resulted in desertification in Somalia and the migration of wildlife out of Somalia because the trees they would have sheltered under are being cut.”

“Cutting trees is also a big part of the widespread drought and famine in Somalia because deforestation leads to a lack of rainfall, which ultimately results in droughts,” he said.

“When the government took control of Barawe, it was a crippling loss for al-Shabaab’s finances because the millions of dollars al-Shabaab earned from charcoal exports came from charcoal that was exported from the Barawe port,” Daud said.

However in its October report, the UN Monitoring Group said more than one million bags of charcoal are still being shipped out of Kismayo Port each month, even though the Somali government resumed control of Kismayo in 2012…

And Kismayo is just one of several ports being used for illegal charcoal shipping.

Socialists urge West to arm the PKK

Leading Marxist voices are calling on the EU and U.S. to ship weapons to the terrorist-designated Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Morning Star, the flagship newspaper of British communists, has editorialized that “Nato member states, including the US, have to rethink previous self-defeating positions, drop their sanctions against the anti-Isis alliance and send arms to those in the front line of this epic struggle,” referring to the PKK and their Syrian Kurd counterparts known as the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

The leading American socialist newspaper The Militant also bemoaned in a recent front page headline that the PKK and YPG are “low on arms.” The self-described anarchist think tank Center for a Stateless Society says that “Supporting the PKK would arguably be far more effective” than current Obama administration policies against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. A petition is also being circulated for submission to the White House for the U.S. to arm the YPG.

Leftist intellectuals are normally highly critical of arms manufacturers and weapons shipments to conflict zones, but are making an exception in this case because they would like to see the formation of a socialist Kurdish state carved out of portions of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.

Such aid to the PKK, in addition to threatening existing regional borders, would violate current U.S. and EU sanctions. The PKK is designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department, and is a specially designated global terrorist group which means that the PKK is subject to sanctions enforced by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). It is unlikely that these sanctions will be lifted unless it’s part of a grand bargain with Turkish president Recep Erdogan involving peace talks with the PKK and Turkish support for U.S. policies in Iraq and Syria.

For now, even shipments to non-PKK Kurdish forces run the risk of violating sanctions against the PKK. The University of Queensland’s Dr. Tristan Dunning told Australian radio that, “What’s happened in the past is that Peshmerga arms have actually ended up with the PKK. So one of the reasons that I’ve heard that the collapse so quickly at Sinjar is actually because the Peshmerga generals in change of that Yezidi town had actually already sold the heavy weapons to the PKK for personal profit. There’s several Peshmerga generals on trial at the moment for selling the weapons for profit.”

Seven habits of highly effective kingpins

Criminal and terrorist groups are highly interconnected according to new analysis of data by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. The conventional wisdom was that criminals worry that working with terrorists may draw unwanted scrutiny from their governments, and they are only inclined to cooperate only in resource-poor environments where it is necessary to survive. But the CTC finds that transnational traffickers and criminals appear to be more than willing to partner with terrorists, and that they benefit from these relationships in a wide variety of environments.

The full report can be read here. It is very thorough (89 pages) and includes academic language and models. Here are a just a few of the salient points from the study about members of the global underworld that may be of interest to practitioners and analysts outside of academia:

1. Interconnected: 98 percent of the individuals in the global illicit marketplace are within two degrees of separation of each other.
2. International: One in three individuals in the network have international relationships.
3. Distributed power: Unlike typical hub-and-spoke networks where 80 percent of the connections rely on 20 percent of the actors involved, the global illicit network is somewhat less dependent on a small number of powerful actors/kingpins. Twenty percent of participants are responsible for only 65 percent of underworld connections. This diffuse hub-and-spoke model makes the network tougher for law enforcement to disrupt.
4. Willingness to work with terrorists: “Individuals involved in other illicit activities link to terrorists 35 percent of the time” (p. 43). Terrorists often serve as “boundary spanners,” that link and form introductions between disparate groups such as drug traffickers, arms dealers, and organized crime.
5. Frequent bilateral links with the United Arab Emirates: The top two bilateral connections in the criminal underworld–the U.S. and Colombia and the U.S. and Mexico–are probably unsurprising to Americans. The third most prevalent bilateral connections are between India and the U.A.E., and the sixth most common are between Pakistan and the U.A.E.
6. Organized crime, not just terrorism, benefits from state sponsorship. We know that state sponsorship of terrorism exists, but for some reason we erroneously assume that state sponsorship of crime does not. The evidence from North Korea, Russia, the Balkans, and Pakistan indicates that criminals can carry out national interests—a phenomenon deserving further study.
7. Convergence is not driven by poverty. Terrorists and criminals are drawn together in a variety of environments, not just in countries where there are little money or resources. The evidence indicates that the opposite is often true—that criminal masterminds prefer climates where there is some level of predictability and economic development, such as Monzer al-Kassar operating in Spain and Dawood Ibrahim in Dubai. Focusing only on failed states could be a red herring.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Twitter user @El_Grillo1 for sending in a link to the CTC study.

This piece has also been published at Terror Finance Blog.

Libyan arms issued to regional terrorists

Weapons are pouring into Libya from around the Mediterranean, for both domestic use among rival factions and for follow-on trafficking to neighboring African hotspots and to Syria, according to a recent UN report.

The unraveling of Libya indicates that the Obama strategy of “leading from behind” during the intervention was unwise, and included little if any plan for the long-term stabilization of Libya or for an orderly resolution to Libya’s political problems. Libya has turned into a more chaotic state that is destabilizing its neighbors than Iraq became under Bush.

The UN report includes evidence from 2013 that blackmarket merchants near the Libyan-Tunisian border are working with Al Qaeda: “Two main caches were discovered in urban areas in Medenine and Mnilah. According to the authorities, the materiel came from Libya in transfers financed by groups linked to Al-Qaida through commercial smugglers.”

Reason blog has helpful piece highlighting some of the other main points from the UN report:

UN Report: Security Situation in Libya ‘Considerably Deteriorated,’ Arms Exported Throughout Region

Ed Krayewski|Mar. 13, 2014

Arms largely in control of non-government groups in a deteriorating Libya are making their way by air, land, and sea to countries from Nigeria to Syria, according to a United Nations report by a panel of experts on the situation in Libya. That panel was tasked with reviewing the effectiveness of arms embargos, travel bans, and asset freezes implemented by various Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 1973, which authorized a no-fly zone over Libya and was used to justify NATO intervention.

On the arms embargo, the panel complains of “limited resources with which to cover a two-way embargo that is breached on a regular basis and covers the entirety of Libya’s territory” and that the “geographical area covered by the Panel’s investigations expands every year and includes a large part of Africa, Europe and the Middle East.” One of the panel’s recommendations is for more experts to analyze the situations on the ground. According to the report, weapons from Libya have reached Tunisia, Algeria, Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Egypt, and the Gaza Strip, almost a who’s who of deteriorating security situations in the wider region. The U.N. reports weapons are also trafficked via Turkey, Lebanon, and Qatar.

The panel is concerned, too, that some companies doing business with gun stores in Libya don’t even know about the U.N. embargo. Handguns, in particular, are in high demand, according to the report, which suggests members of security forces could be selling their handguns to civilians. Government agencies in Libya anyway rely on local armed groups for some public security, which the U.N. panel points to as an implication weapons are likely being shared.

The demand for guns among civilians shouldn’t be as a surprise. The U.N. panel describes a security situation that’s “considerably deteriorated” and reports continued significant increases in “carjacking, robbery, kidnappings, tribal disputes, political assassinations, armed attacks and clashes, explosions from improvised explosive devices and demonstrations.”

It’s likely not regular Libyans worried about their personal and family security that’s a primary contributing factor to the overall security situation in Libya. Instead, it’s what the U.N. panel identifies as a “complicated mix of Al-Qaida affiliated and inspired groups” that have set up across Libya in the chaos that followed the 2011 intervention. The panel describes a firefight between Special Forces from the Libyan government and Ansal al-Shariah in Benghazi in November that killed nine. A campaign of assassinations and suicide bombings has followed in the city. The U.N. report also relays a raid on a Libyan military base identified as “camp 27,” where the United States may have been training and supplying Libyan forces. The U.S. government responded to the panel’s questions that “some items that had been transferred to Libyan control were unaccounted for and presumed stolen”…

Thanks to Genug for the news tip.