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Hezbollah Page 45

by Levitt, Matthew


  Later, when the United Nations investigated violations of the Angola sanctions, a collection of five Western and African intelligence agencies all “pointed to the involvement of a Lebanese diamond trading network that was buying diamonds from UNITA before and after the imposition of sanctions in July 1998.” One Lebanese diamond trader cited in the Belgian report, whose family was reported to be “connected with Shi’ite organizations, in particular Hezbollah,” was Imad Bakri. Interestingly, press reports identified his brother, Yousef, as one of eleven Lebanese diamond dealers executed for their alleged roles in the assassination of President Laurent Kabila in the DRC in January 2001. Hezbollah reportedly pressured the DRC government to return the bodies to Lebanon, suggesting some or all of the accused Lebanese plotters had ties to the group.110

  Nor were Hezbollah’s ties to conflict diamonds limited to Angola. According to a former US official with firsthand experience following Hezbollah activity in Africa, Sierra Leone has become “Hezbollah’s center of gravity” in Africa.111 In large part, blood diamonds explain why.

  For more than a decade starting in 1991, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel army renowned for fielding child soldiers and committing gross crimes against humanity, fought the central government in Sierra Leone with the generous support of Liberian president Charles Taylor. The RUF mined the diamond fields under its control, and reportedly used Lebanese diamond traders with ties to Hezbollah as middlemen.

  Douglas Farah, whose 2001 Washington Post reports highlighted Hezbollah and al-Qaeda ventures in African conflict diamonds, identified the RUF’s principal diamond dealer as Ibrahim Bah, a former Senegalese rebel–turned–Islamist militant. In the 1980s, Bah trained with Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and fought with the group in southern Lebanon before returning to Libya, where he met and befriended a variety of African militants. From 1987 to 1988, Bah was in Afghanistan, training at a jihadi camp near Khost and fighting in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. At one point during these early years of his militant career, Bah also served as a bodyguard to Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi. By the end of the 1980s, Bah was back in Africa fighting for Charles Taylor—one of the people with whom he trained in Libya—and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia.112 In July 2000, a small-time diamond dealer, Ali Darwish, earned $50,000 for introducing Bah to Hezbollah supporter Aziz Nassour, Farah reported. Bah then contracted Nassour to manage large quantities of diamonds on behalf of RUF and al-Qaeda.113 By 2001, intelligence sources and associates identified Bah as “a conduit between senior RUF commanders and the buyers from both al Qaeda and Hezbollah.”114

  Among the Lebanese businessmen with whom Bah worked, Aziz Nassour and Sammy Ossailly were identified as two of his “key brokers.” Together, the three men signed a three-year lease on a four-bedroom house in Monrovia to be used as a safe house. There, in rooms decorated with Hezbollah posters and pictures of Osama bin Laden, the Senegalese hired to staff the safe house were said to watch videos of Hezbollah suicide attacks on Israeli troops.115

  Starting in the late 1990s, an intelligence source told the Washington Post, the Congo in particular saw an influx of “hard-core Islamist extremists” in what was described as a new “Wild West.” The intelligence source acknowledged “we know Hezbollah is here, we know other groups are here, but they can probably operate a long time before we know enough to stop them.”116 Shortly after Farah ran his first story on this issue in November 2001, the regional security officer at the US embassy in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where Farah was living, shared with him two lines of a classified cable reporting credible threats against Farah’s life for reporting the story. The next day Farah’s editor received another warning from a different country’s intelligence service that individuals were planning “to take care of the Washington Post reporter.” A source of Farah’s informed him further that Ibrahim Bah planned to plant drugs on Farah at the airport, forcing Farah and his family to be escorted onto their flight home by US embassy security personnel.117

  Aziz Nassour and Sammy Ossailly’s activities as blood diamond smugglers who pay for the stones with weapons used to fuel war in Africa are further documented in a Belgian police slide presentation. Marked “For Police Use Only,” the presentation focuses on the two operatives’ activities from 1999 to January 2002. Filled with detailed link-analysis charts and including handwritten notes and lists of weapons, the presentation is compelling.118 In October 2002, Belgian Federal Police provided two different FBI field offices with information regarding the diamond smuggling activities of Sammy Ossailly and Aziz Nassour.119 At one point, Belgian investigators sought the assistance of their American counterparts when one of the individuals they were investigating was found to be staying at a hotel in Miami.120

  Expelled from Angola in 1998 after having been accused of helping UNITA, Nassour moved to Marbella, Spain, where he worked with Mohammed Derbah, a reported Amal member involved in weapons trafficking. In late 2001, Spanish authorities arrested Derbah “for involvement in arms trafficking and financing Hizballah and AMAL.” Seventeen additional people were arrested with Derbah, all tied to a Canary Islands–based ring associated with Amal and Hezbollah and involved in fraud, money laundering, forgery, and extortion. Two years later, Derbah was arrested again, this time for money laundering. The group, which Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon linked to Amal and Hezbollah, netted more than $10 million a year, primarily through an especially lucrative time-share scheme targeting German and British citizens.121

  In 2002, both Nassour and Ossailly were arrested, this time in Belgium, and convicted of illicit diamond smuggling in 2003.122 But even as authorities investigated their activities, others stepped in to keep Hezbollah’s diamond pipeline intact. Another person whose company Belgian intelligence suspected of “possibly being connected to Hizballah” was Abdallah Ezziddeen. In spring 2002, Ezziddeen reportedly tried to buy a diamond-prospecting concession on the Namibian coast near South Africa. But when meeting with the owners of the concession, he expressed little interest in its production potential—he just wanted to buy in immediately. The exchange raised authorities’ suspicions that Ezziddeen’s interest may not have been in the excavation of Namibian diamonds per se, but in the ability to smuggle blood diamonds mined illegally elsewhere into Namibia and register them as having been found in Namibia. A common practice among illicit diamond smugglers, the scheme enables smugglers to declare and then legally export diamonds that would otherwise be subject to sanctions and strict export controls. Hearing news of the possible concession sale, Israeli security consultants reportedly met with the sellers and expressed a keen interest in Ezziddeen and the prospect of the sale going through. The sale did not go through, but Hezbollah’s reach into the African diamond industry persisted.123

  As recently as September 2006, a senior State Department counterterrorism official testifying about Hezbollah’s global reach noted that “Lebanese traders are also very active in diamond exports, both as a business and in criminal exploitation.”124 In 2008, when reports emerged that Hezbollah might be targeting Israeli businessmen in Africa, Israeli diamond merchants were not surprised. “The big problem for Israelis in West Africa,” an Israeli in the diamond business commented, “is that there are countries whose diamond industry is controlled by Lebanese locals, a majority of whom openly support Hezbollah.”125

  US officials confirmed the gist of the Israeli businessman’s fears when, in December 2011, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York filed a forfeiture action and civil money laundering complaint against the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB), several money-exchange houses and other companies, and thirty US used car purchasers and dealerships. The civil action, based on a detailed Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation, found that among the Hezbollah-affiliated entities with which the Lebanese bank did business was a Belgian diamond trader of Lebanese origin named Ibrahim Ahmad. According to a UN panel of experts, the civil complaint noted, a company in which Ahmad was a
principal purchased $150 million in diamonds from the DRC in 2001. Ahmad’s clan, the UN report noted, had ties to Hezbollah and was involved in counterfeiting, money laundering , and diamond smuggling.126 As auditors combed through the LCB’s accounts, they found almost 200 accounts that, according to US officials, “appeared to add up to a giant money-laundering operation, with Hezbollah smack in the middle.” At the center of many of the complex transactions they uncovered was one common theme: companies trading diamonds.127

  Radicalization and Recruitment by Iran and Hezbollah in Africa

  Committed to its constitutional directive to export the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) proactively recruits Shi’a in Africa by tapping the efforts of Iranian and Lebanese missionaries proselytizing across the continent. One of the most prominent clerics to come has been Sheikh Abdul-Munam Azzain, a former student of Ayatollah Khomeini who opened a Shi’a Islamic Center in Dakar, Senegal, in 1978. In Nigeria, Sheikh Ibrahim Alzakzaky has been described as “a protégé of Iran [who] is involved in disseminating Shiite theology and creating a radical socio-economic and military system that resembles that of Hezbollah in Lebanon.”128

  As early as 1985, the CIA was aware that Iran was known to “promote subversive activity” among remote countries with Shi’a populations, including Nigeria.129 Three years later, a CIA report acknowledged the phenomenon was far more widespread than originally thought, highlighting Hezbollah’s participation in efforts to spread Iran’s Islamic revolutionary vision across Africa. Despite the group’s relatively small size at the time, the CIA wrote in 1998, “We believe Hezbollah—sometimes acting in concert with Iran—will continue to seek the spread of its brand of fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Africa.” Working both independently and together, the intelligence report anticipated, Hezbollah and local Iranian diplomatic missions would be “likely to focus attention on the African Muslim communities in West Africa, especially in pro-Western Liberia and Sierra Leone.” And while unlikely to win many religious converts, Hezbollah and Iranian diplomats could be counted on to “expand their inroads among Africa’s Christian and animist populations” by offering more of a populist than a religious message as a counterweight to Western influence in the region.130

  Analysts and officials confirm that Hezbollah continues to partner with Iran to spread a shared ideological message of Islamic revolution. “In some parts of Africa,” Doug Farah wrote in 2006 based on interviews with US and European intelligence officials in West Africa, “Hezbollah, through Iran, has also worked to recruit militants and develop a teaching network of radical Shi’ite imams and mosques to compete with the larger and more visible Saudi-funded Sunni Salafist efforts.”131 Sometimes such efforts are understated and coordinated through local institutions sponsored by Iran. For example, an Israeli report identified a mosque in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, that was financed by the Iranian embassy and suspected of serving as “a kind of umbrella framework for fundraising activity on behalf of Hezbollah.”132 Another report pointed to a similar institution, the Iranian Cultural Center in Khartoum, Sudan, which “is used as a meeting place by Islamic networks and as a center for disseminating Iranian propaganda and Shi’ite literature.”133 Shortly after setting up its first diplomatic mission in Sierra Leone in 1983, “the Iranian embassy in Freetown acquired the reputation of being the centre of Iran’s spy network for all West Africa,” according to Global Witness. Suspicions were likely fed by the establishment of an Iranian cultural center in Freetown that was never actually opened to the public.134 In 2009, the Moroccan government cut off diplomatic ties with Iran over Tehran’s aggressive use of such proselytizing tactics in the North African state.135

  In other cases—though rare—Hezbollah and Iran have engaged in more blatant, public radicalization efforts. In 2008, for example, press reports included pictures of a joint Hezbollah-Iran parade in Nigeria, where an unidentified Shi’a mullah was given full military honors by uniformed militiamen before a crowd sporting hundreds of yellow Hezbollah flags and giant posters of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini and current leader Ayatollah Khamenei. “One can draw a number of similarities,” one analyst noted, “between the Cuban ‘volunteers’ who were acting at the behest of the Soviet Union, promoting communism in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and Hezbollah acting as Iran’s proxy, advancing Tehran’s Islamic revolution today.”136

  Often Iran recruits directly from the pool of Lebanese Shi’a communities across Africa. The Africa Division of the Revolutionary Guard’s Qods Force has “built many cells in Africa,” according to a 2011 report, “most of which rely on Shiite emigrants from Lebanon who live in Africa.” Once spotted and recruited, these recruits are sent to Iran for training. According to a retired Israeli military officer, “Lebanese recruited for the Iranian intelligence efforts were invited to visit Iran, where they underwent training in the field of intelligence. Upon their return, they serve as a nucleus for recruiting others and provide a base for Iranian intelligence activity in their countries.”137

  Such efforts are not limited to Lebanese Shi’a. According to a study commissioned by the US military, Iran uses scholarships to African students as “a major recruitment tool.” Iranian scholarships are offered to students across Africa as part of Tehran’s “greater diplomatic effort to simultaneously promote the broader Hezbollah agenda in Africa and undermine Western influence and credibility across the continent.” Wherever Iran has embassies in Africa, the report added, “it also sets up cultural centers that ‘award’ scholarships and ‘study tours’ to Iran.”138 One such effort, focused on the recruitment of Ugandan Shi’a for religious study—and military and intelligence training—in Iran was exposed in 2002.139

  The Ugandan recruits, along with young Lebanese Hezbollah members, underwent a month-long basic training course “specially tailored by Iranian intelligence.” The mixed group of Ugandan Shi’a and Lebanese Hezbollah recruits was then taught to use a variety of small arms, produce improvised explosive devices, collect preoperational intelligence “on installations and people for terrorist attacks,” plan escape routes, and withstand interrogation techniques. The students were given fictitious covers, money, and means of communication and then “instructed to collect intelligence on Americans and Westerners present in Uganda and other countries.” Their Iranian handlers saw these new recruits as force multipliers, telling both Shafi Ibrahim, leader of a cell of Ugandan Shi’as working for Iran, and his partner Sharif Wadoulo to be attuned to the need to expand Iran’s network in the region and “to recruit other Ugandan civilians for similar assignments.”140

  Smuggling Arms via Africa

  Iran has a long history of smuggling weapons through Africa.141 As case after case has demonstrated, Hezbollah enjoys greater operational flexibility and support in those places where Iran runs intelligence and logistical support networks. Iranian involvement in the Karine A weapons smuggling ship—intercepted by the Israeli Navy in the Red Sea in January 2003—is especially revealing not only in terms of the quality and quantity of the weapons being shipped, or in its intended recipient being the Palestinian Authority, but also in the hands-on role played by Hezbollah in the operation.

  The naval commando raid had all the makings of a Hollywood script. As dawn broke on January 3, 2002, Israeli Navy commandos boarded the Karine A as it plied the waters of the Red Sea en route to the Suez Canal. The operation, executed in the high seas some 500 kilometers south of Israel, went forward flawlessly and without injury. In a press statement the following day, then–Israeli chief of staff Shaul Mofaz praised the “daring and complicated mission” executed by a task force made up of Israeli Navy commandos, air force fighter pilots providing air cover, and intelligence specialists.142 The seized ship was rerouted to the southern Israeli port of Eilat, where its crew was arrested and contents seized. Spread out over the secured dock, the weapons arsenal was huge.143

  Most weapons smuggled through this regio
n would arrive by ship at Port Sudan, after which they would be smuggled north overland across the Egyptian border, through the Sinai, and into the Gaza Strip. Not in this case. Purchased in Lebanon in August 2001, the ship then sailed to Port Sudan, where over twelve days it was loaded with regular cargo and renamed the Karine A. Both the regular cargo and the name change were designed to provide cover for the ship’s true mission, smuggling weapons. Also in Sudan, the ship’s original crew was replaced with the smuggling team, including Omar Akawi, an officer in the Palestinian Authority’s nascent navy. Over time, Port Sudan became well known as “a shipping point for Iranian arms to Hamas in Gaza and to Islamist organizations in both North and Sub-Saharan Africa.”144

  In November, the Karine A departed Port Sudan and sailed over four days to the port city of Hodeidah, Yemen. On the instructions of Adel Mughrabi, the Palestinian Authority’s point man on the weapons smuggling operation, the ship then sailed for the Iranian island of Qish in December 2001. According to Israeli officials, since October 2000, Mughrabi had been in regular contact with the Iranian agents and Hezbollah operatives with whom he planned the smuggling plot.145

 

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