By Itai Zehorai, Forbes
2017 has turned out to be an especially bloody year. Over the course of the year, eight huge terror attacks were executed, each with more than a 100 fatalities. Six of the eight deadliest attacks claimed the lives of nearly 1,500 people this year in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt and Somalia – planned, financed and carried out by the Taliban, ISIS or Al-Qaeda. According to the Global Terrorism Database of the University of Maryland, in 2016, these organizations were responsible for approximately 70% of the world’s terror victims.
It is no coincidence that the deadliest terror organizations in the world are also the wealthiest. “There is a clear connection between the two factors,” agrees Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Amos Gilad, chairperson of the Institute for Policy and Strategy and former director of the Defense Ministry’s Political-Military Affairs Bureau, in an interview for Forbes Israel. “The financial component of terror organizations is critical, and its indispensability for terror attacks is like fuel for the car,” he adds.
As such, financial means are an essential necessity for terrorist organizations. But means of fundraising are inherently limited and are conducted primarily through underground channels, outside of and above the law in the global shadow economy. In many cases, the nature of fundraising activity is remarkably similar to that of criminal organizations – dealing in drugs, weapons, tobacco or humans, through bank robbery or collecting money in the name of “protection” and even kidnapping for ransom.
Alongside the clearly criminal activity, there is also open activity in which enormous sums of money change hands among funding bodies and terror organizations. This fundraising involves associations, charitable organizations, companies in business, finance bodies, wealthy businessmen – and as it would seem in recent years – governments and states of means.
“Behind every successful terrorist organization stands a financial system and in many cases, it’s a country,” declared the head of IDF Intelligence, Major General Herzi Halevi. “In our region, Iran is the primary funder of terror organizations.” And, indeed, in a comparison of the estimated income of the richest terror groups that we conducted three years ago, one of the salient trends emerging from the findings is the significant strengthening of those terror organizations supported by assisting countries (Hizballah, Hamas, the Islamic Jihad) and the weakening of those that depend on independent sources (ISIS, Boko Haram).
Iran, one of the four countries defined by the US State Department as a terrorist country (along with Sudan, Syria and the newcomer North-Korea), is the main sponsor and force behind many terrorist organizations. Its centrality in the balancing of economic (and militant) forces of terror organizations in the Middle East has become critical as compared to previous years, and its importance in terror groups’ internal systems of considerations has become crucial.
All of this is possible on account of Iran’s being rescued from the financial quicksand in which it was sinking until not long ago. “The signing of the nuclear agreement and lifting of the sanctions was the removal of the rope around the Iranians’ neck,” asserted Major General (Res.) Amos Gilad. “It actually saved them from economic strangulation.”
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The involvement of other countries in the region, particularly those of the Persian Gulf, played a central role in the terror arena in recent years. Those countries constitute an important pillar in the financing of terror in the region, whether indirectly, by turning a blind eye to financial transgressions of private entities in the country, or by paying ransom for the release of abducted citizens.
Sometimes, as happened recently, the funding streams intersect – and the boundaries between aid money that flows to terror organizations from particular countries and ransom payments are blurred almost entirely. As part of the condition of the ransom transaction for the release of 26 members of the Qatari royal family who were abducted in Iraq by a local Shiite militia, supported by Iran, Qatar was “forced” to pay an imaginary ransom which, according to an exposé by the Financial Timeswas around a billion dollars. The unprecedented payment that financed some of the deadliest terror organizations in Syria and Iraq (and Iran itself), was seen by many as direct support of terror by the provocative princedom of oil and led to the famous boycott imposed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain.
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