Douglas Farah: "On Terror Financing, in London and Beyond"

By Andrew Cochran

Doug Farah is on travel and asked me to post his comments on the London terrorist attacks:

"It has become almost conventional wisdom--pushed in part by the 9-11 Monograph on Terror Financing--that the money used by terrorists is a small sum that is virtually impossible to trace, and therefore should not be a priority in the efforts against global terrorism. The London attacks should serve as a a reminder of the fact that, no matter who was behind the efforts, they had to live in London, establish credible cover, be there long enough to develop a fairly complex plan, and then execute it. We will soon here some number on how much the actual materiel cost, probably less than $50,000, and then the usual line about how that money was impossible to detect or cut off.

The problem with that analysis is that each step of the process requires money for each person, and must usually be multiplied by numerous people involved. The attack will involve safe houses, possibly false id papers, cash for living for a significant period of time, possible escape routes etc. While it may not be an enormous sum of money, it will ultimately be a significant amount, if properly calculated.

The other huge expense, though not directly related to the London attack, is the support for the insurgency in Iraq. My sources tell me that there are now many, perhaps thousands, of wealthy and not so wealthy people on the Arab Peninsula who are sponsoring one or two jihadis. That is, they give the combatants money for travel, visas and other expenses, and send them on their way. This is a far more difficult stream of money to find and combat, and a far cry from the days when the jihadis had outfits like the Third World Relief Agency in Vienna, Austria, funneling tens of millions of dollars to false charities and front groups.

Yet this a huge problem, and a river of money. Estimates of the number of jihadis in Iraq range from 2,000 to 10,000. Each sponsorship per person is at least $10,000, plus the ongoing expenses of feeding, training, arming, etc. It is a very difficult thing to track this kind of micro-sponsorship or hold anyone accountable. Yet as long as these channels remain open, those that enable terrorist actions by financing them will remain a serious threat to the United States, its allies, and anyone else who opposes the militant version of a unified Islamic caliphate under sharia law."

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