Hezbollah (58 page)

The large Lebanese diaspora in Africa has long made the continent a particularly rich source of financial and logistical support for Hezbollah. Whether their supporters in any given community are many or few, Hezbollah operatives can hide in plain sight within these communities. And they can operate with near impunity because crime and corruption are endemic to Africa. In one representative assessment, a senior law enforcement adviser for Africa at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime explained that Africa attracts international organized crime because it consists of weak states, often characterized by corruption, dominated by weak and uncoordinated law enforcement agencies, and accustomed to the involvement of high-level officials in criminal activity.
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In several African countries, a 2010 US Federal Research Division survey found, Lebanese with suspected or known ties to Hezbollah were associating themselves with key military and government officials and even heads of state to become financial advisers and confidants. From this position, the study noted, they could “pilfer millions of dollars from government contracts, kickbacks, or mismanagement of state companies.”
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Africa has served not only as a prominent cash cow for Hezbollah but also as a place where exhausted or injured Hezbollah fighters went to recuperate, reportedly including Imad Mughniyeh himself.
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With connections in the lucrative diamond industry, ties to heads of state and other prominent decision makers, and extensive business interests in Africa, prominent Lebanese Shi’a living in Africa have proven to be a critical link in Hezbollah’s foreign support network. And as the string of kidnapping plots suggests, from time to time Hezbollah operatives have tapped this network to carry out terrorist operations as well. In January 1988, a CIA intelligence assessment projected that “paralleling developments inside Lebanon, Hizballah probably will expand its influence with the Lebanese African communities.”
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How those communities migrated to Africa in the first place is a story in itself.

Maronite Christian immigrants from Lebanon, in what was then the Ottoman Empire, first arrived in West Africa in the nineteenth century, particularly in what is now Sierra Leone. The migrants were predominantly entrepreneurs either seeking to prevent their sons from being conscripted in the army under a fading Ottoman banner or fleeing financial pressures that hit Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century. Africa, however, was not their destination of choice. According to a US intelligence report, “many of these early migrants traveled to Africa because they could not meet the more stringent health requirements of the United States and because travel documents were not needed for the French and British colonies.”
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With the onset of World War I, the pace of migration increased. Some, looking for economic opportunities, were drawn to West Africa in response to British and French colonial officials who sought a foreign business class to serve as middlemen between the colonial governments and local populations—the latter of which had questionable loyalty to their colonial governments.
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Shi’a Muslim immigrants started arriving in 1903, largely in response to population pressure and poor agricultural yields in southern Lebanon, and they quickly surpassed the Lebanese Christian community in numbers. This new wave of Lebanese immigrants not only hailed from a different confessional element of Lebanese society; in some cases—like the Lebanese émigrés to the Ivory Coast—it was also largely uneducated and impoverished.
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During the first half of the twentieth century, the Lebanese Shi’a community continued to grow in numbers and political influence, especially in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone.
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In several countries, the success of Lebanese businessmen bred widespread jealousy and hostility on the part of locals. In 1919, riots broke out targeting Lebanese merchants in Freetown, Sierra Leone, who were suspected of hoarding rice at a time when the staple was scarce.
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Beginning in the 1970s, the Lebanese communities in Africa became more politicized with the arrival of additional immigrants, almost all of whom were Muslim and a majority of whom the CIA assessed were “members of Shia sects that are in practice, or at least potentially, influenced by Iran.”
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Whereas in the 1960s Christians made up nearly half the Lebanese community in the Ivory Coast, by the late 1980s their proportion had fallen to 10 percent. And of the 30,000 Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the CIA reported in January 1998, “about half have arrived in the last decade, and the majority are impoverished former street-fighters from Beirut.”
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Throughout the Lebanese civil war, the various factions and sectarian elements of the Lebanese communities in Africa sent money back home to fund their respective groups’ militias. Setting the stage for the kind of fundraising tactics Hezbollah would later master, many of these factions engaged in a wide array of illicit financial dealings to raise the needed funds. Organized gangs sometimes attacked businesses in a Mafia-style racketeering scheme to pressure businessmen to “donate” to the cause.
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Particularly as Lebanese Shi’a gained visibility in West Africa, views of the Lebanese community deteriorated among existing inhabitants. By the 1980s “the [once] indispensable middlemen between town and country” in the Ivory Coast were seen as “racist … corruptors of others as well as being themselves corrupt.” Ivorians feared local Lebanese, regarding them as “a fifth column working towards the disintegration of the state.” The Lebanese, Ivorians feared, sought to “‘Palestinize’ or ‘Lebanize’ the Ivory Coast by securing a hold on key posts of the economy.” Their activities, a further fear held, would turn the country into a “haven of anti-Western lackeys of Hizbollah.”
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As Hezbollah gained ground and members at the expense of Amal back home in Lebanon, a similar trend occurred in Africa. Having set itself apart from Amal, and with other groups like Islamic Amal joining the Hezbollah fold, the choice between the two groups became increasingly stark. Writing in 1988, the CIA noted that “over the past two years—reflecting events in Lebanon—Hizballah’s presence in Africa has grown at the expense of Amal and other Muslim Lebanese factions.”
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Beyond ideological differences, financial incentives contributed to defections from Amal to Hezbollah, with the emergent group now offering “not only the virtue of ideological simplicity and authenticity, but the rewards of hard cash.” While Hezbollah enjoyed the benefits of generous funding from Iran, Amal relied on donations from Lebanese supporters even during the hard-hit economy of the 1980s.
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The loss of donations from Amal’s supporters among the Lebanese diaspora in Africa, therefore, not only paralleled defections from Amal to Hezbollah back home in Lebanon but may have contributed to the phenomenon in Africa as well.

In fact, Amal appears to have been forced to rely more heavily on coercive measures to raise funds in Africa as increasing numbers of supporters were drawn to Hezbollah. Threatening the welfare of relatives living back in Lebanon if “donations” were not paid, Amal, in 1986, was able to collect $1 million from Nigerian Lebanese, $500,000 from Ivorian Lebanese, and $400,000 from Liberian Lebanese. (In time, Hezbollah would adopt this tactic itself). As Amal and Hezbollah jockeyed for power back home, the CIA assessed that the “many Lebanese in Africa are likely to rally to Hizballah’s side and provide the movement with financial and material support.”
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That they did.

Over time, Hezbollah’s support networks in western and central Africa grew substantially. Africa analysts reported that Hezbollah, with the help of its networks in East Africa, operated in Sudan, Uganda, and Somalia, holding the most extensive presence of all terrorist groups active in the area.
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This expanded presence was the result of a concerted effort reportedly spearheaded by Imad Mughniyeh to build support networks within Lebanese Shi’a diaspora communities. By one account Mughniyeh was “the architect who instituted the establishment of support cells” in Lebanese Shi’a communities outside Lebanon.
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By 1988, support for Hezbollah had already become so entrenched within the Lebanese immigrant community in Africa that the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence wrote an eighteen-page analytical report on the economic and political roles of Lebanese communities in sub-Saharan Africa. The report made clear that the US
intelligence community was concerned not only about Hezbollah’s fundraising activities in the region but about the prospects for Hezbollah terrorist operations in Africa as well. One issue the paper sought to address was “the radical, pro-Iranian Hizballah movement” and “the potential for terrorism against pro-Western governments and U.S. facilities and citizens in the region.” Portions of the declassified report that remain redacted include “Coping with a Terrorist Threat” and “Hizballah’s Links to Tehran and Tripoli.”
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On January 13, 1987, German authorities arrested Hezbollah operative Muhammad Hammadi at Frankfurt Airport as he attempted to smuggle liquid explosives into the country. Around the same time, another Hezbollah operative was arrested in Italy, but it was the arrest of Hammadi in particular that led to a series of Hezbollah terrorist operations aimed, at least in part, at securing his release. Hezbollah could tolerate the arrest of an average operative, but not the arrest of a member of the IJO’s inner circle. Such was the case with Imad Mughniyeh’s fixation on securing the release of his brother-in-law, Mustapha Badredinne, and the rest of the Kuwait 17, and such was the case now with the Hammadi clan.

Hezbollah quickly carried out several operations aimed at securing Hammadi’s release, including the kidnapping of two German nationals in Beirut.
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The kidnapping of the German businessmen in Beirut was allegedly carried out by Muhammad Hammadi’s brother, Abbas Ali Hammadi. When that operation failed to secure his brother’s release, Abbas traveled to Germany himself, presumably as part of some more serious plot to free his brother. But on January 26, 1987, just thirteen days after his brother’s arrest, Abbas was also arrested at Frankfurt Airport as he landed.
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That appears to be when Hezbollah called upon Hussein Ali Mohammed Hariri to hijack Air Afrique flight 56—a civilian airliner traveling from Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, to a final destination of Paris, France—in an attempt to secure the release of both Hammadi brothers, as well as other detained Hezbollah operatives.

Hezbollah’s clear commitment to seek Hammadi’s release indicated how important a player he was within Hezbollah’s IJO. A member of a clan closely tied to Hezbollah, Muhammad Hammadi already had an impressive terrorist resume. Most notably, in June 1985, he and Imad Mughniyeh, together with several other Hezbollah operatives, hijacked TWA flight 847 after it took off from Athens and redirected the plane to Beirut.

Air Afrique flight 56, a DC-10 jumbo jet, originated in Brazzaville on the evening of July 24, 1987. Its flight plan called for stops in Bangui in the Central African Republic and then Rome before arriving in Paris. While officials first assumed Hariri had boarded the flight in Brazzaville, they later learned his embarkation point was Bangui, where he brought on board an Italian 7.65-millimeter pistol and explosives.
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Amazingly, he smuggled these possessions onto three different flights without
incident or challenge. At Beirut International Airport, Hariri hid his weapons in a box supposed to have contained pastries. From there he flew to Lagos, Nigeria, where he transferred the weapons into a sports bag that was carried on board by an airport employee. (It remains unclear if the employee was a knowing accomplice or simply assisting a passenger.) From Lagos, Hariri flew to Bangui, where a small, token bribe greased the palms of a local customs official to allow Hariri to bypass security.
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He may have had more organized help, though. According to the CIA, “Hariri almost certainly received some support in the Central African Republic (CAR) before he boarded the flight in Bangui.”
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One can imagine Hariri, now seated on the flight, his weapons on board, sighing in relief at having gotten this far unimpeded. For the next several legs of the trip, he bided his time, perhaps steeling himself for the moment of truth when he would strap on his explosives and hijack the aircraft. That moment came shortly after the plane took off from Rome for Paris. As the flight flew over Milan, Hariri brandished his handgun, exposed the explosives now wrapped around his waist, and commandeered the aircraft. Threatening to shoot passengers or blow up the plane, he demanded the flight veer off course and land in Geneva, Switzerland, for refueling so that he could direct the plane to Beirut. It appears Hariri intended to replicate Hammadi and Mughniyeh’s TWA hijacking from just two years earlier.
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The flight landed at Geneva’s Cointrin International Airport with 164 people on board. Aside from fifteen crew members, the great majority of the passengers, sixty-four, were French, but Americans, Britons, a Canadian, and citizens of several African and Latin American countries were also represented. After conferring with French and Ivorian officials (because the airline was headquartered in the Ivory Coast and was due to land in France), Swiss authorities decided the plane would not be allowed to leave Geneva. Meanwhile, Hariri issued demands for the release not only of the Hammadi brothers but of other jailed Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists as well. As Swiss security forces considered how to charge the plane, airport personnel began refueling it as slowly as possible to buy time.
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