A Bit More on Dawood Ibrahim and Why He Matters
By Douglas Farah
Because of the high interest in my recent post on Dawood Ibrahim and requests for more information, I am adding to that the little more that I know and have learned in recent days.
Ibrahim is known to have at least 8 passports, all issued by India and all from Mumbai, where the recent attacks occurred. He uses well over a dozen aliases, which he uses, along with the names of henchmen and family members, to owe properties around the world, including in United Arab Emirate, Australia, Canada and Pakistan. He is also deeply involved in the informal hawala money transfer trade that moves billions of dollars a year, primarily among Pakistan, the Arab Peninsula and India.
This ability to cross relatively unimpeded between the worlds of legal business, organized criminal activities (kidnapping, extortion, drug running, smuggling of all kinds) and terrorism makes Ibrahim one of the primary "shadow facilitators" in the criminal-terrorist nexus.
Like Viktor Bout, Monzar al Kassar, A.Q Khan and others, these individuals are part of multiple networks, so targeting them brings the added value of making life more difficult for several organizations at the same time.
What makes Ibrahim so interesting is that he is Indian by birth, but now works with Pakistani radicals (and possibly, from time to time, with the ISI), making him, in the eyes of the Indian government, a traitor. This is particularly true given his role in funding Pakistani groups claiming the Kashmir, which is a flashpoint in India.
Yet, like A.Q Khan, he is able to find refuge in the Arab world, primarily, like Khan, Bout and others, in the United Arab Emirates, specifically in Dubai. My full blog is here.
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