Hezbollah (63 page)

In November 1993, reports emerged indicating that several Hezbollah operatives, including car-bomb experts, had arrived in Mogadishu and “could be planning car bomb attacks on U.S. and U.N. forces in Somalia.” According to US officials, hardline followers of Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed had established ties to Hezbollah.
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Thirteen years later, a few months after the end of the July 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the United Nations revealed that during the war Somalia’s radical Islamic Courts Union (ICU) dispatched approximately 720 experienced militants to Lebanon to fight alongside Hezbollah against the Israeli military. “One of the criteria of the selection process,” the UN monitoring group reported, “was individuals’ combat experience, which might include experience in Afghanistan.” Only eighty or so members of the Somali militant force returned to Mogadishu after the fighting ended, some of whom were wounded and received medical care at a private hospital the United Nations described as “operated and secured” by the ICU.
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In early September, the United Nations reported, around another twenty-five Somali fighters returned home, accompanied by five Hezbollah members. The UN report did not specifically say what business the five Hezbollah members had in Somalia, though it did note elsewhere that “the Hezbollah movement (operating in Lebanon) has provided military training to ICU and has made arrangements with
other States on behalf of ICU for the latter to receive arms.” Among the Somali fighters who had not returned home, the report added, “a number” extended their stays in Lebanon to attend advanced military training courses provided by Hezbollah.
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Hezbollah’s presence in Somalia from the 1990s until the present day mirrored a larger shift in the group’s operations and fundraising activities from West to East Africa, with a particular emphasis on Sudan. In the mid-1990s, according to former CIA chief George Tenet, Hassan Turabi, the leader of the Sudanese National Islamic Front, not only hosted terrorist conclaves and allowed terrorists to run training camps in Sudan but also facilitated the travel of North Africans to Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon.
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According to the State Department’s 1999 global terrorism report, Sudan continued to serve as “a meeting place, safe haven, and training hub” not only for Hezbollah but for members of al-Qaeda, the Egyptian terrorist groups al-Jihad and al-Gama’a, and a variety of the Palestinian terrorist groups.
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By rubbing shoulders in Sudan, where they enjoyed safe haven and openly engaged in terrorist training, such groups sometimes developed unlikely relationships.

One such relationship began when Hezbollah and Iran established contacts with senior al-Qaeda members in Sudan in the 1990s. According to the
9/11 Commission Report
, “while in Sudan, senior managers in al Qaeda maintained contacts with Iran and the Iranian-supported worldwide terrorist organization Hezbollah.” Intelligence, the 9/11 Commission found, “indicates the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior al Qaeda figures after Bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan.” In fact, following the successful al-Qaeda attack on the USS
Cole
in Aden harbor in October 2000, Iranian officials reached out to al-Qaeda in a “concerted effort to strengthen relations,” according to the
9/11 Commission Report
.
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In 1991 or 1992, the 9/11 Commission determined, “discussions in Sudan between al-Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support—even if only training—for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives.” Yet another delegation trained in explosives, intelligence, and security procedures in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon in fall 1993, the commission remarked.
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As part of their agreement, the CIA noted, “experience from Hezbollah and Iran should be transferred to new nations/extremist groups who lack this expertise. This would then allow [bin Laden’s] Islamic Army members [al-Qaeda] to gain the necessary experience in terrorist operations.”
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Al-Qaeda and affiliated Egyptian terrorist groups sought to gain operational knowledge from Hezbollah and Iran in order to advance their own capabilities. Ali Muhammad, an Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative who was also involved in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, pointed to Hezbollah’s success in the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks at Beirut International Airport and explained that both al-Qaeda and EIJ wanted to learn how to replicate such attacks.
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Seeking to achieve such objectives, al-Qaeda and EIJ operatives held a series of meetings in Sudan with their Iranian and Hezbollah counterparts. Ali Muhammad described one particular meeting between Hezbollah’s international operations
chief, Imad Mughniyeh, and bin Laden. According to Muhammad’s testimony following the meeting, “Hezbollah provided explosives training for al-Qaeda and al Jihad [EIJ]. Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons. Iran also used Hezbollah to supply explosives that were disguised to look like rocks.”
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Yet while Sudan and Iran built ever-closer ties, Khartoum’s relationship with Hezbollah eventually seems to have soured. In summer 2006, just after Hezbollah’s war with Israel, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir publicly commended “the steadfastness of Hezbollah under the leadership of Nasrallah.”
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Three years later he praised Hezbollah again, saying, “We trust Hezbollah and its leadership and we consider them a genuine resistance group deserving respect and honor.”
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But in the same year, in a first-ever acknowledgment of Sudan as a weapons-smuggling route, a Sudanese diplomat in Egypt claimed that Sudanese rebel groups in the country’s south may have partnered with Hezbollah to facilitate weapons smuggling through Sudan. “The suspicions of [Hezbollah] dealing with rebel groups that are spread all over Sudan are real since these movements do not recognize the national sovereignty in the first place,” he said.
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A year later, perhaps trying to placate the central government in Khartoum, Hezbollah came to President al-Bashir’s defense after the International Criminal Court indicted him for the second time, this time for genocide. In a statement posted on a Hezbollah website, Hezbollah expressed “complete solidarity with Sudan—with its president, its government, and its people—over the new allegations leveled against the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, by the International Criminal Court.”
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But that was not all. Also in 2010, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah reportedly offered to put Hezbollah fighters at the disposal of the Sudanese government to confront what Nasrallah described as “the colonialist forces in Darfur.” There is no evidence the offer, apparently made in a letter to the governor of Northern Darfur, was acted upon, but the governor seems to have responded positively. “Darfur is a land in which Islam runs deep and we are more than eager to support the Palestinian and Lebanese causes though Jihad and martyrdom,” the governor reportedly replied. Echoing a typical Hezbollah mantra, he added, “This is not religious extremism, rather the defense of rights of the oppressed around the world.”
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And then something changed, albeit quietly. No announcement was made, but sometime in 2010 Sudan reportedly added Hezbollah to its list of terrorist groups and organizations. According to press reports, a US diplomatic cable dated December 26, 2010, noted the addition to the secret Sudanese government lists, which, the cable stressed, are not published and are available only through personal connections with officials from Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Service.
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At the time, Sudan was working hard to win Washington’s good graces. Though weapons smuggling for Hamas, in particular, and other support for terrorism continued, the State Department reported in 2010 that Sudan remained a cooperative partner in actively targeting global jihadist terrorist groups like al-Qaeda.
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Sudan remained on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, however, and it is not clear if Sudan’s designation of Hezbollah—if, in fact, the cable documenting the unpublished list is accurate—ever led to any concrete action by Sudan targeting Hezbollah.

Information pointing to continued Hezbollah and al-Qaeda ties persisted through September 11. “Circumstantial evidence” indicates that senior Hezbollah operatives were “closely tracking” some of the September 11 hijackers’ trips into Iran in late 2000. For example, in November 2000, September 11 hijacker Ahmed al-Ghamdi traveled to Beirut on the same flight as a senior Hezbollah operative. In addition, three of the September 11 hijackers, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, and Ahmed al-Nami, flew from Saudi Arabia to Beirut and then to Iran. On their flight to Iran, a senior Hezbollah official traveled on the same plane. According to the commission report, “Hezbollah officials in Beirut and Iran were expecting the arrival of a group during the same time period. The travel of this group was important enough to merit the attention of senior figures in Hezbollah.”
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While the 9/11 Commission found no evidence that Iran was “aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack,” it cited “strong evidence” that Iran facilitated al-Qaeda members’ travel—including that of some of the September 11 hijackers—through Iran to Afghanistan.

One area in which groups affiliated with both Hezbollah and al-Qaeda are now active is smuggling drugs through Africa. A particularly lucrative means of terrorist financing, the African narcotics pipeline has secured the immediate attention of intelligence and law enforcement officials around the world. In late February 2012, Yuri Fedotov, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, informed the UN Security Council, “The West African transit route feeds a European cocaine market which in recent years grew four fold, reaching an amount almost equal to the U.S. market. We estimate that cocaine trafficking in West and Central Africa generates some $900 million annually.”
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A year earlier, in February 2011, US director of national intelligence James Clapper testified, “Drug trafficking continues to be a major problem in Africa.” Speaking in the context of his annual US intelligence community worldwide threat assessment, Clapper highlighted “the emergence of Guinea-Bissau as Africa’s first narco-state” in an effort to “highlight the scope of the problem and what may be in store for other vulnerable states in the region.”
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The drugs flowing through the small West African nation were not African in origin. With almost no drug cultivation or production of its own, Guinea-Bissau hosted only the corruption and lawlessness that made it an attractive transit route for traffickers of South American narcotics. Drugs from Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela—and some from elsewhere in Africa—pass through Guinea-Bissau en route to southern Europe, according to the State Department’s 2010 counternarcotics report.
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At least some of this activity, according to Interpol and UN reports, involves Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. “Cocaine traded through West Africa accounts for a considerable portion of the income of Hezbollah” and other terrorist groups, according to one report. Hezbollah leverages Lebanese Shi’a expatriate communities in South America and West Africa “to guarantee an efficient connection between the two continents.”
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Speaking in April 2009, Interpol secretary-general Ronald
Noble acknowledged that law enforcement efforts “dismantled cocaine-trafficking rings that used their proceeds to finance the activities of the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] and Hezbollah, while drugs destined for European markets are increasingly being channeled through West African countries.”
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The drug smuggling threat came into focus in spring 2007, when two cocaine shipments from South America—each around 630 kilograms—were seized in Africa, one in Guinea-Bissau and the other in Mauritania.
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By April 2010, the problem had become so endemic that the US Treasury Department felt compelled to designate Guinea-Bissau’s former navy chief of staff and its then–current air force chief of staff as drug kingpins. Among other activities, the two officials were “linked to an aircraft suspected of flying a multi-hundred kilogram shipment of cocaine from Venezuela to Guinea-Bissau on July 12, 2008,” according to the Treasury Department.
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Then, in November 2009, an unmarked Boeing 727-200 commercial jet mysteriously crashed in the northern Mali desert some ten miles from a makeshift airstrip. Though completely burned out, the aircraft was suspected by authorities to be carrying a massive shipment of drugs, with a plane that size capable of carrying up to ten tons of narcotics. The mystery was compounded by the revelation that Mali’s aviation authority was barred from investigating the crash for more than three weeks, and Mali’s police counternarcotics unit was not allowed to investigate the crash at all. The entire investigation was run by Mali’s secret intelligence service. In the wake of these episodes, American and British diplomats drafted cables expressing heightened fears about “the prospect of al-Qaida and Hezbollah exploiting the region’s UN-estimated $1.3bn-a-year drug trade to fund terror.”
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For those investigating the drug trade on the ground, the dangers are real. One journalist, Marco Vernaschi, recounted being dragged out of a Bissau hotel bar by six drunken Lebanese. “We all know what the foreign journalists look for in this country,” the ringleader said. “And I know your name, Marco, so if I see anything published from you that mentions drug trafficking I will find you, wherever you are.” Despite the threat, Vernaschi subsequently published content arguing that even considering the generous support the group received from Iran, “most of Hezbollah’s support comes from drug trafficking, a major moneymaker endorsed by the mullahs through a particular fatwa.” Vernaschi wrote that for a fee, Hezbollah facilitates drug trafficking for other smuggling networks, including those of the Colombian terrorist group FARC. Once shipments arrive at one of the ninety islands off the coast of mainland Guinea-Bissau, the cocaine is broken down into smaller batches and either sent by fast boat to Morocco or Senegal or trucked in armed four-wheel-drive vehicles across traditional Sahel (transcontinental corridor north of the Sahara) smuggling routes.
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