The New World Expansion of Hezbollah

By John C. Thompson - Mateckenzie Institute

Introduction

With the recent defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the distinction of being the world's most sophisticated and globalized terrorist group has passed to the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. Yet many observers reasonably argue that this has always been more innovative and powerful than the LTTE. Moreover, the Tigers were a limited threat to the Western World, but this is not true of Hezbollah.

In the last fifteen years, Hezbollah - both on its own account and as a proxy of Iran - has undergone a rapid expansion beyond the Middle East. Its recent entry into the cocaine trade will make it more dangerous yet, particularly inside North America. The danger it poses must not be underestimated.

The Fundamental Facts of Hezbollah

For centuries, the Shiites of what is now Lebanon were a poor under-educated minority and often excluded from playing key roles in that country's complex multicultural plurality under the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the French Mandate of 1919-1946. The multicultural constitution that came with Lebanon's independence kept the Shiites as a weak minority.

There is a price for multicultural constitutions and Lebanon paid it in their 1975-1990 Civil War when the Palestinians (particularly the PLO), Syrians and Israelis joined the Christians, Druze and Sunnis in tearing the country apart. This tiny country - with a 2009 population of 4.2 million - lost around 200,000 dead during their complex Civil War; with a corresponding high price in economic damage and lost infrastructure.

At first the Shiites were poorly armed, less organized, and had less to fight for other than to attempt to defend against the PLO. This started to change after the 1979 Iranian Revolution when proponents of the radical Khomeinist ideology began missionary work among Lebanon's Shiites and provided arms. Many Shiites welcomed the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) as liberators when they invaded south Lebanon in June 1982 to crush the PLO. The IDF overstayed its welcome after Arafat's ouster from Lebanon in August 1982. Shiites increasingly listened to the radical demagogues from Iran, accepted their weapons, and saw Israel's South Lebanon defence zone as an occupying force.

Not surprisingly, Iran soon sent help to the Shiites in the form of 1,500 members of its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) into the Bekka Valley outside the Israeli defence zone to assist with training and supply.

With this largess Hezbollah soon emerged from a splinter of the Amal Militia and pledged itself to Iran's revolutionary ideology.

The exact relationship between the nascent Hezbollah, the IRGC, and the Islamic Jihad Organization (which claimed responsibility for several notorious acts of terrorism in Lebanon in 1982-84) have never been entirely clear. Imad Mughniyah was associated with all three and led many key Hezbollah operations until his death by car-bomb in Damascus in February 2008.

The history of Hezbollah's activities inside Lebanon and against Israel is extensive and has been well documented elsewhere.

Given the usual complexities of Middle Eastern politics, where the old maxim "The enemy of my enemy is my friend' is subject to a dozen sub-codicils, Hezbollah's relationships with other players in Lebanon have been complex. However, its hostility to Israel and declared hatred of the United States has been unwavering.

Like al Qaeda and Sunni terrorist groups, Hezbollah's ideology is based on Islam. It seeks the supremacy of Sharia law and the global exultation of its faith. It seeks to supplant corrupt local governments, destroy Israel and defeat the United States in order to achieve these aims. Notwithstanding the many differences between Shiites and Sunnis, Hezbollah is perfectly capable of cooperating with Sunni terrorist groups against common enemies and has often done so.

Several points must be remembered about Hezbollah.

1. Although a proxy and junior partner of Iran and its revolutionary ideology Hezbollah can operate on its own initiative. The 2006 war with Israel resulted from an operation ordered by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, apparently without approval from Iran.
2. Given support from Iran and the many lessons learned in 25 years of frequent clashes with Israel, Hezbollah has far more experience than any other Islamic terrorist group. Its cells are better organized, have access to better material, and are much better trained. Moreover, unlike al Qaeda, Hezbollah governs a population and picks and chooses its personnel more selectively.
3. Hezbollah is well disciplined. Individual members or cells seldom act autonomously. Many terrorist organizations (like the Animal Liberation Front or today's 'home grown' Jihadis) are not much more than a loose network of people with a shared ideology and name brand. By contrast, Hezbollah rarely violates its own rules.
4. Hezbollah has always placed a considerable emphasis on gathering intelligence and utilizing it effectively. This includes spies, an observer corps, modern sensors and even advanced signals intelligence to eavesdrop on Israeli communications. This illustrates the effectiveness of their command and control apparatus.
5. Hezbollah's political arm is a major Lebanese party in its own right. This party secured veto power over Lebanon's Parliament and 11 of 30 cabinet seats for itself in 2008 (a result of a power-sharing agreement that narrowly headed off a new civil war). This gives Hezbollah the convenience of political power without the burden of administering a whole nation state. It also lets the organization operate with virtual impunity inside Lebanon while aggrieved nation states cannot admonish Lebanon for the misdeeds of Hezbollah.
6. Hezbollah has also been a trail-blazer for other Islamic groups with its provision of medical and educational services to its population. This facilitates recruitment and indoctrination.
7. Hezbollah also owns its own media services and trained its own cameraman and photographers for international news services, as was clearly evident in the fabricated 'news' that came out of Lebanon in 2006.
8. Hezbollah has an enormous appetite for money to pay for its fortifications, arms, social programs and political apparatus. It draws finances from Zakat charitable donations made by Lebanese Shiites, by direct subsidies from Iran (much reduced at the moment) and from its own business activities. Moreover, Hezbollah has long been involved in organized crime, particularly in the lucrative hashish trade out of South Lebanon. Beyond this, it 'taxes' imports into Lebanon and takes a tiny piece of many transactions made by Lebanese Shiites abroad.

By 2010, Hezbollah had greatly reinforced its position in South Lebanon and now has stocks of over 60,000 artillery rockets - some with the range to reach southern Israel. They have prepared four 'brigades' with a view to lunging into Israeli communities on the border. Given Hezbollah's long history of kidnapping and the acute anxiety Israel suffers when its citizens are made hostage, one can imagine the real objective of these brigades. Hezbollah has even drawn hundreds of new recruits from Fatah and other Palestinian groups. The threat it poses is growing very rapidly. This makes an examination of its presence in the Americas even more important.

The Lebanese Diaspora

Much like their distant Phoenician ancestors of the Ancient World, today's Lebanese are constrained by the tiny size of their homeland. Both 3,000 years ago and today, this tiny maritime country has encouraged emigration. Moreover, while the laws of governments and societies may change, kinship networks always endure.

Lebanon's population today is around 4.2 million people, but 10 to 11 million Lebanese are strewn around Africa and the Americas. Just as Hindus and Muslims from the old British Raj once formed much of the commercial class in eastern Africa; Lebanese provide much of the same function in western Africa, especially in former French possessions. Lebanese were among the first Middle Eastern immigrants into Argentina, Brazil, the French Caribbean, the United States and Canada; with some (mostly Christians) coming as early as the 1870s.

Not being as commercially oriented or as comfortable abroad as Christians and Sunnis, Lebanon's Shiites were slow to follow other Lebanese overseas. But they have followed in increasing numbers since the 1970s and are now widely established. The entire émigré community affords Hezbollah a familiar cultural/linguistic base, but real penetration specifically requires the presence of Lebanese Shiites. The organization has been quick to enable this.

Culturally, Lebanese are very different from the rest of the Arab Middle East. Most Lebanese are multilingual. Their own patois of Arabic could arguably be a separate language in itself that owes much to a strong infusion of Syriac (a Semitic dialect suffused with Aramaic), Turkish, and French. Lebanon's long cosmopolitan history makes even rural Shiites familiar with non-Arabic influences on diet, dress, habit and interests.

Lebanese culture, like the rest of the Arab Middle East, places a strong loyalty on family and kinship linkages. The persistent weakness of Lebanese government even before the outbreak of the Civil War only reinforced this trait. While Lebanese Christians have a greater involvement than Muslims in far-flung trading and commercial relationships that utilize such linkages, they are very much a part of the entire Lebanese society.

This background gives several advantages to members of Hezbollah:

1. A Lebanese Shiite will normally have exposure to a greater tradition and experience in long-distance commerce than would commonly be found among Jihadists from elsewhere in the Islamic World. This has greatly facilitated Hezbollah's ability to participate in globalized black and grey market activities, including narcotics and smuggling.
2. A Hezbollah member can be more comfortable travelling in Western or Latin American cultures than a Sunni Jihadist and is less likely to trigger suspicion in police and customs officials. The easy 'tells' that often attract attention for al Qaeda members (like being nervous in front of female custom officers, not using Western-style toilets correctly, etc.) will be less apparent.
3. A Hezbollah member is not necessarily dependent on the group to financially support him when staying away from home. Moreover, being able to call on distant kin for accommodation and other services sometimes makes it much more difficult to track the movements of individual members of Hezbollah when they travel to different countries.

South America

Hezbollah startled the world with the deadly bombings of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992 and an Argentine synagogue in 1994. Investigators soon realized that the terrorist attacks were supported out of the local Lebanese community. Attention was soon drawn to the tri-state area where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina all meet. Investigators were again startled to find that Hezbollah had a quasi-permanent presence established there amid expatriate Lebanese before the attacks occurred.

This tri-state area has long been home to a lively smuggling industry, particularly as products and people can slip across lightly defended borders to a second (or third) jurisdiction when in trouble. In 2000, Paraguayan authorities insisted there were 460 Hezbollah operatives in the region. There are mosques on the Argentine and Brazilian side that feature radical Khomeinist preachers, and there is money to be made moving narcotics, counterfeit CDs and falsified documents to and fro.

There have been no further Hezbollah attacks in the region since 1994, but it is clear that Hezbollah sympathizers are deeply lodged in the area and are donating a share of their profits to the organization. In addition to Shiite missionary work (often sourced back to the Iranian embassy in Argentina), Hezbollah's supporters have been working traditional old fashioned right-wing anti-Semitism as a recruiting and networking tool. This contrasts with the feelers for traditional old-fashioned left-wing revolutionaries they have extended elsewhere in Latin America.

Venezuela and Narcotics

Venezuela, like many Latin American countries, has experienced periods of immigration in the past and now has a community of some 130,000 Lebanese; over half of whom are Muslim. This has been enough for Hezbollah and the Iranians to leverage their way into gaining more of a foothold. In 2007, two explosive devices were found near the American embassy and local Hezbollah affiliates claimed credit. In contrast to Hezbollah's usual style, these were small and extremely simple and evidently intended to scatter propaganda leaflets - which suggest the local converts still think in terms of old-fashioned revolutionary terrorism rather than the new more lethal style pioneered by Islamic groups.

The Hezbollah attackers in Argentina in 1994 allegedly had Venezuelan IDs and travel documents, and Venezuelan police determined that remittances from their Lebanese community were going to Hezbollah through businesses located in their country. Since Hugo Chavez took power in 1999, international cooperation with Venezuelan police in matters concerning Hezbollah has markedly declined.

Chavez is an anachronistic throwback to Benito Mussolini or Juan Peron (without the organizing ability of the first or the charisma of the latter), but he has been taking Venezuela in dangerous directions. Like most traditional Latin American strongmen with a penchant for demagoguery, Chavez has been training new paramilitary forces. Trying to inflate his image as a hero, he has been busy posturing at the United States -- which has tried to ignore him as gracefully as anyone can with a Chihuahua gnawing on their ankles. Chavez has been making overtures to Cuba, Russia and China, but especially to Iran and Hezbollah.

By 2006 Chavez sent 500 men to train in Iran for "Oil Field Security' - not that this is a particularly technical occupation nor was it necessary before -- but Chavez has been creating large new paramilitary forces to act as a political militia composed of his supporters. The IRGC was eager to help train the new force's cadre. Since March 2007, Iran Air has run a weekly scheduled flight from Tehran to Caracas, a sure sign of the growing ties between the two governments.

Shiite Islamic Missionary work is being widely undertaken, especially among Wayuu Indians. This is a populous tribe with a strong tradition of opposition to government whose reserves overlap the Columbian/Venezuelan border. Given their militant tradition and favourable position for smuggling, the Wayuu have a number of attractions for Hezbollah and the Iranians. An organization styling itself Autonomia Islamica Wayuu announced its presence in 2007 on a Hezbollah website.

So far, between Wayuu militants, some of the Latin American converts to Hezbollah, and Chavez himself, there seems to be an absence of sophistication and very little prior knowledge about militant Islam. One might wonder if the Venezuelans truly understand what they have so casually invited into their country. One might also wonder just how carefully Hezbollah is playing the fish nibbling on their line.

Smuggling conduits are probably already operating full bore. After the Colombian government finally got the upper hand on narco-guerrillas of FARC (with some American help) in 2007-08, it became clear that Venezuela was playing an increasing role in the cocaine industry. Hundreds of FARC members have been knowingly extended Venezuelan citizenship and have freely traveled in that country.

A Colombian raid on March 1^st 2008 inside Ecuador resulted in the death of the senior FARC leader Paul Reyes and the recovery of laptop computers whose contents revealed the significant extent to which senior Ecuadoran and Venezuelan government figures have become involved in the cocaine industry. Notwithstanding the usual protestations from the usual suspects, the ties between Chavez and the cocaine-fueled guerrillas were again confirmed in July 2009 when AT-4 anti-tank rockets (a modern Swedish weapon widely used by many Western armies) surfaced among FARC guerrillas in Colombia after having been sold to Venezuela.

With the recent slump in oil prices, Hezbollah had seen diminished subsidies from Iran. However, the group is more prosperous than ever and is supposedly even picking up the tab for Iranian-backed Shiite insurgents in Yemen. This strongly supports suggestions that Hezbollah is also capitalizing on the weakening of FARC and is rapidly positioning itself to become the world's leading bulk-distributor of cocaine.

With its own ships and aircraft, Lebanese government connections and their international alliances, Hezbollah is placed to make hundreds of millions of dollars annually from cocaine trafficking.

Where the Lebanese Shiite Tweedledum is openly established, the Iranian Tweedledee is seldom far away: IRGC has also frequently been reported to have an open presence in Venezuela. An AFP news story in May 25^th, 2009 claimed that Venezuela has been sending uranium to Iran. Venezuela has deposits of uranium but no nuclear infrastructure of its own. But for its tin-pot dictator at the helm, Venezuela might have been almost entirely disinterested in mining and refining its uranium.

Rumours from the uranium mine sites imply a strong Islamic presence on the ground. Indian workers are said to be complaining of being ordered to pray several times daily, and that Shiite missionaries are hard at work among the labourers. Hezbollah is usually a little more sophisticated than this, but the same cannot be true for some of the more boorish cadres of the IRGC.

Central America and Mexico

In March 2009, Michael Braun (the recently retired chief of operations for the DEA) and six other US officials stated that Hezbollah had become involved in the operations of Mexico's drug cartels. The cartels control smuggling routes for narcotics and people into the United States, Hezbollah brings access to government resources from Iran and Lebanon for access to arms and major equipment. While the cartels already have a plentiful supply of aggressive gunmen, Hezbollah offers better training in bomb-making and more sophisticated means of intelligence gathering.

As in Venezuela and the Tri-State Area further south; there is a small Lebanese expatriate community in Mexico. Again, the original immigrants were not Shiites, but they have been able to follow. Once again, there are business opportunities offered by a well-developed economy with a weak law enforcement system, and twice these conditions have been sufficient for Hezbollah to gain a foothold elsewhere in the Americas. Reuters reported that Hezbollah established itself in Mexico as early as October 2006. Two years earlier, the CIA reported it was concerned about the possibility.

Next to narcotics, the next largest money-maker for organized crime around the world is supporting illegal immigration, and one destination of choice is the United States. With its growing influence in Mexico, Hezbollah is positioned to take advantage of both activities and to service the American market. The FBI noticed Hezbollah agents on the US-Mexican border in early 2009. In July 2010, Mexican authorities broke up a Hezbollah network in Tijuana, just across the border from southern California.

The other attraction for Hezbollah in Mexico lies in Chiapas Province. While the cartels are busy on the American-Mexican frontier, Mexico's southern border has been in social turmoil for some years. El Murabitun is a sect of European converts to Sufi Islam that has been engaged in missionary work in some parts of Latin America since the mid-1990s and plays on some of the same themes that worked for the radical left. One area where they are reputed to have enjoyed considerable success is in Chiapas.

Hezbollah has sent its agents into the area since 2005 and have been taking advantage of the inability of many converts (particularly among the local Indians) to tell the difference between Sunnis, Shiites and Sufis. The Zapatistas have apparently decided not to contest with the Islamists and instead seek common cause with them. Hezbollah is now providing communications in the local Mayan dialect as well as in Spanish.

An entrenchment in Chiapas would give Hezbollah the opportunity to further facilitate smuggling from Guatemala and points south, and may make them even more valuable partners for the cartels to the north.

In the United States

Although relentless in its hatred of the United States, Hezbollah has always refrained from launching attacks on American soil. This may not always be true in the future.

Since the Second World War, 180,000 Lebanese have immigrated into the United States. Again, the Shiites were slow to follow, but since the end of the Lebanese Civil War they have come in increasing numbers and now form the majority in some old Lebanese neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods also attract many Palestinian Arabs and are forming radicalized hubs.

At present, Hezbollah uses the United States for money raising, technology purchases and recruiting. It largely had a free hand in the US until 1996 when the State Department designated it a foreign terrorist organization after the Khobar Towers bombing. This enabled domestic law enforcement to go after Hezbollah members in the US. What the FBI and other investigators found were shell companies, business fronts, and organized criminal activities all designed to raise money for the group.

Between 1996 and 2006, US investigators detected a dozen instances of Hezbollah raising funds in the US. The Hammoud brothers in North Carolina were a case in point. They would ship low-taxed cigarettes from the tobacco-growing state into high-taxed states like Michigan and New York and sell them on the black market. Another businessman made illegal bulk purchases of cigarettes from Native smoke-shops in upstate New York and resold them in Detroit. Federal investigators found that they had funneled some $8 million in profits back to Lebanon.

More modest but similar cases involved grocery stores that would sell promotional products or condemned and stale-dated goods -- with the proceeds going to Hezbollah. In February 2010, three Lebanese men in Miami were charged with offences relating to smuggling consumer products out of the southern US to the Tri-State Area in South America..

Will Hezbollah continue to regard the US as a place to finance its activities elsewhere or is it positioning assets for potential strikes inside the United States at a critical moment - such as when Iran's nuclear program is attacked. Notwithstanding its deep involvement in narcotics, Hezbollah is first and always a terrorist organization with exceptionally well-trained and disciplined cadres. Homegrown al Qaeda-inspired Sunnis in the US do not have the patience to act as sleeper cells; this is not true for Hezbollah.

At an operational level, Hezbollah continually develops intelligence and undertakes reconnaissance. Since 9/11, there have been hundreds of reports of potentially hostile surveillance of hospitals, schools, emergency responders, office towers, power plants, refineries and public sites. Most of these reports could not be adequately investigated as perpetrators leave at the first sign that suspicions have been aroused. As the public's awareness of terrorism fades and policing resources are diverted to other tasks, more of these incidents go unreported. While many of these activities are thought to have been undertaken by supporters of al Qaeda, Hezbollah is also suspect.

James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, told a Senate Committee in February 2009 that he is aware that Hezbollah has identified 29 key targets in the US and the Western World whose destruction would - in the words of Iran's president Ahmadinejad -- "end Anglo-Saxon civilization'. Even given Ahmadinejad's penchant for exaggeration, this is the sort of threat that cannot be ignored.

Hezbollah in Canada

Like the United States, Canada has been attracting immigrants from Lebanon since the 1880s, although the vast majority of these were French-speaking Christians until after the Second World War. The Lebanese Civil War and the relaxation of Canadian immigration guidelines resulted in a flood of Druze and Sunni Lebanese starting in the 1970s, with Shiites following soon afterwards.

Canada's 2006 Census revealed that 270,000 Canadians claimed Lebanese origins. The Hezbollah-Israeli clash of the same year revealed that some 50,000 of these had returned to Lebanon as dual citizens - much to the consternation of other Canadians who disliked Ottawa footing the bill for the hasty evacuation of many of these 'Canadians of convenience'. Regardless, there are large well-developed Lebanese communities in many Canadian cities.

While Lebanese Shi'ites were slow to arrive in Canada, they have come in the tens of thousands and members of Hezbollah are among them. Ali Adham Amhaz, Fauzi Ayub, Mohammed Hassan Dbouk, Mohammed Hussein al Husseini and Omar el Sayed are all among the Canadian residents variously identified as being members of Hezbollah in the past. At least one was recruited in Canada. Three were involved in purchasing high tech equipment for Hezbollah, and at least two were involved in scams that raised over $1.3 million for the group. Another was trafficking cocaine and heroin.

One of the five was arrested in Israel, travelling there on a Canadian passport to pre-position gear for Hezbollah. One was producing propaganda material for the terrorist organization back in Lebanon as recently as 2007. At least two were known to have been gathering intelligence for potential attacks inside Canada.

In 2008, CSIS acknowledged that it was monitoring some 20 members of the group inside Canada belonging to four recently activated sleeper cells. These conducted reconnaissance against Canadian synagogues and the Israeli embassy. This upsurge in activity was in response to the February 2008 death of Imad Mugnniyah, Hezbollah's legendary bomb-maker. In any event, after briefly sticking their periscopes up, Hezbollah's Canadian assets have since slid underwater again.

Hezbollah has used Canada as a place to recruit, raise money and acquire equipment. It is ominous that there have been no reports of the latter three activities for over seven years. One could be reminded of the old movie cliché: "It's quiet out there.' To which the inevitable response given just before a surprise attack unfolds is: "Yeah, too quiet.'

Conclusions

Hezbollah is probably the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world, being the largest, best trained, best disciplined, best financed and best armed. It has a presence wherever Lebanese Shiites are found but unfortunately, it has an alarming capacity to appear in other places too.

Terrorist groups that get heavily involved in legitimate and illegitimate funding tend to go through an evolutionary process. As the pay roll and expenses expand, it is difficult to curb the budget. This tends to make such groups more interested in continuing to make money than in pursuing their original agendas. Eventually, they reach a stage where they have largely morphed into organized criminal societies that use the cause to justify their business activities. This is a life cycle that has not been studied as closely as it deserves.

It is clearly hard to monitor Hezbollah's senior cadres for signs of personal corruption but it is certain they are frantically stockpiling arms and equipment. They are investing time and effort in long-term expansion - but this could be both for the purposes of the Jihad or for a gradual evolution into a global criminal empire.

With expansion in the Americas, particularly into the US and Canada, we will learn soon enough whether Hezbollah is more interested in truck bombs or narcotics trafficking. The problem is that the answer could be explosive.

John Thompson is President of the Mateckenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: institute@mackenzieinstitute.com