Over the last several decades, the militant Lebanese organization Hezbollah has morphed from an Iranian-inspired and Iranian-funded Shiite militia into a political and social movement as well. In the process, notwithstanding the $200 to $350 million in financing it allegedly receives from Tehran, it has turned increasingly to criminal activities to fund its operations. Today, Hezbollah sits astride a worldwide criminal syndicate that generates upwards of a billion dollars a year in income for the group. Hezbollah's criminal income is generated from four main areas of activity: narcotics, money laundering and currency counterfeiting, widespread low-level crime centered primarily on financial fraud, and extortion.
Subversive organizations have often turned to criminal activities as a way of funding their operations. At the turn of the 20th century the Bolsheviks robbed banks to finance themselves. During the 1970s and 1980s, European groups like Baader Meinhof, Brigate Rosse, and Direct Action supplemented the funds they received from the Soviet Union by staging kidnappings for ransom or robbing banks. More recently, the FARC in Columbia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic State have all turned to dealing in narcotics as a source of funds.
Many current criminal organizations, the Yakuza in Japan, the various criminal organizations in South China, and the Sicilian Mafia and its related brethren, the Camorra in Naples and the Ndrŕngheta in Calabria, all began or were in part inspired by a political agenda. All of them turned to crime to obtain funds for that agenda. Over time, their political inspiration was watered down and eventually disappeared. The criminal element remained, however, now transformed into a for profit crime syndicate. The FARC in Colombia has shown a similar evolution. What began as a Maoist-inspired insurgency against the Colombian government, which used cocaine trafficking as a source of funds, has evolved into an organization that is not quite a for profit crime syndicate, but neither is it just an insurgency any longer.
The UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the worldwide narcotics market generates between $400 and $500 billion in turnover every year. Over the last several decades terrorist organizations have increasingly looked to narcotics as a source of funds. The skill set necessary to survive as a militant organization, to smuggle arms and munitions, to move operatives around the globe surreptitiously and to stage attacks, is the same skill set needed to manufacture, transport and distribute narcotics on a world-wide basis.
Hezbollah's Narcotics Trade
