The connection between Islamic terror and drug profits

Robert Rotberg writes at Homeland Security News Wire,

Defeating ISIS, al-Qaeda and their offshoots will, in other words, depend more on cutting off their riches than countering their appeal to wide-eyed would-be fundamentalists.

Various big-power intelligence services are looking into how the drug trade works in Africa, and the interconnections of drug routes and militancy. The most comprehensive work is being done by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which has agents in Africa and issues pointed reports about the trade.

Nevertheless, given the clandestine nature of narcotics and trafficking, conjecture and speculation abound. With big money at stake, operatives have every reason to cover their tracks.

Thanks to research done by the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College, we do know that cocaine arrives in Africa from South America on an almost daily basis.

...Stemming from growers in Peru and Colombia, some cocaine leaves Venezuela and Brazil by private jet aircraft bound for secret airfields in Guinea-Bissau. This small West African nation is widely regarded as Africa’s primary narco-state. In recent years, military coups and other forced changes in Guinea-Bissau’s weak government have directly reflected competition for control of drug-fueled profits.

Other loads of cocaine from Colombia arrive at proper international airports in Nigeria, Benin and Ghana, hidden in shipments of plantains or coffee. Corrupt airport officials and customs and police officers make sure that the valuable shipments are soon on their way by air or road to Europe.

The fact is that today about 40 percent of the cocaine that reaches Europe annually comes via Africa.

That is where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), or several of the Islamist groups that have been active in raiding and destabilizing Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso, muscle into the picture. They want their cut of the profits, either from being the major transporters of cocaine across the Sahara to Europe or from facilitating that traffic for a sizable slice of the returns.

...On the other side of the continent, Asian-refined heroin derived from Afghan or Burmese poppy seeds flows by dhow sailing vessel and by air into Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. There it is redirected to Europe, and sometimes, via Nigeria, to Mexico and North America.

Al-Shabaab, the Islamist, al-Qaeda-affiliated terror movement of Somalia, derives much of its predatory income from the movement of Asian heroin and locally produced qat.

Seleka, the Muslim insurgent group that captured and fractured the Central African Republic before being ousted by French and other militias, made money from transshipping drugs from south to north. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has always had side operations in West Africa among the Lebanese diaspora, also profits from narcotics dealings on the periphery of the Sahara.

Whether al-Shabaab, or any of the other al-Qaeda- and ISIS-associated movements in Africa, would continue to constitute serious threats to local and world order absent abundant incomes derived from smuggling drugs and other goods like charcoal and hashish is not known with any certainty. But, certainly, drug profiteering is an opportunistic pursuit that drives terror activities.

...Combating terror in Africa, at least, now depends as much on cutting off insurgents from their sources of income as it does on defeating them on the battlefield – a much longer, tougher, and more costly pursuit.

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