Cigarettes and the Criminal/Terrorist Nexus
By Douglas Farah
The minority staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security has, as first reported by Fox News, posted an interesting report on the ties between cigarette smuggling and terrorism.
The report focuses primarily on smuggling in New York and the billions of dollars in lost revenues suffered from illicit cigarette sales.
But in fact, the smuggling and sales of cigarettes have long been one of the primary life-blood sources of criminals and, increasingly, of terrorist activities.
The criminal-terrorist nexus is not new, but it is of growing importance.
The Taliban's deep engagement in the poppy trade and the FARC's growing dominance in the cocaine trade are the two clearest examples, but there are countless others.
Some of it is petty crime, but often the overlap comes in the world's largest illicit markets, precisely because the true ownership and connections are hardest to detect in those settings.
Cigarette smuggling is one of those venues, and is not new, but is perhaps now more dangerous.
The report, (with little additional evidence other than a footnote attributing the information to interviews with law enforcement) concludes that:
Historically, the low-risk, high profitability of the illicit cigarette trade served as a gateway for traditional criminal traffickers to move into lucrative and dangerous criminal enterprises such as money laundering, arms dealing and drug trafficking. Recent law enforcement investigations, however, have directly linked those involved in [the] illicit tobacco trade to infamous terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and al Qaeda.
The connection is likely to be less linear than the prose suggests, but it is likely there, as it has been for other organizations for decades. My full blog is here.