Hezbollah (60 page)

Examples such as that of Qubaysi led the authors of one US government study to note that contributions by Lebanese Africans, often taking the form of religious
tithes, are frequently paid in cash and collected by Hezbollah couriers transiting the region for this express purpose.
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As is the case among all terrorist groups that raise funds under the cover of charitable giving, some donors are willing participants in Hezbollah’s financing schemes while others are unwittingly defrauded into funding terrorism. Yet another source of funds is furnished by criminal enterprises and businesses serving as fronts for the organization.

According to US intelligence, “Hezbollah maintains several front companies in sub-Saharan Africa.”
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More specifically, many Hezbollah activists in the tri-border area of South America relocated to Africa and elsewhere following sharpened attention on the group’s activities after the 1992 and 1994 bombings in Argentina. For example, Paraguayan authorities arrested Hezbollah’s Assad Ahmad Barakat in 2002 just as he was about to flee to Angola.
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According to a Paraguayan intelligence official, some of the primary Hezbollah members active in the tri-border area in 1992–95 likewise moved on to Angola. “We don’t really know why they decided to go to Angola,” the official added.
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The heavy presence of front companies in Africa, however, predated the arrival of these transplants.

In May 2009, the Treasury Department designated Kassim Tajideen as “an important financial contributor to Hizballah who operates a network of businesses in Lebanon and Africa.”
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According to Treasury’s fact sheet, Tajideen contributed tens of millions of dollars to Hezbollah and funneled money to the group through his brother, a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon. Tajideen, a dual citizen of Lebanon and Sierra Leone, was joined by his brothers in running “cover companies” for Hizballah in Africa, Treasury revealed.
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In fact, Tajideen had already been under investigation six years earlier. In May 2003, after a four-month international investigation by Belgium’s Economic Crimes Unit, Belgian Judicial Police raided the Antwerp offices of Soafrimex, a Lebanese export company owned by Kassim Tajideen; arrested several of its officials; and froze its bank accounts on charges of “large-scale tax fraud, money laundering and trade in diamonds of doubtful origin, to the value of tens of millions of Euros.” Tajideen and his wife were also arrested in connection with the charges. A few months later, Belgian authorities informed officials from the Congolese embassy that an investigation conducted on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) demonstrated that “the company systematically undervalued its imports, shipping and insurance costs and that it filed false customs declarations.”
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Eight months after Treasury designated Kassim, another aviation tragedy struck the Lebanese African community. On January 25, 2010, moments after taking off from Beirut’s Rafiq Hariri International Airport, Ethiopian Airlines flight 409, en route to Addis Ababa, crashed into the Mediterranean, killing all ninety passengers on board. Compounding the sense of despair, many people from southern Lebanon who had lost relatives in the 2003 crash lost family members in the Ethiopian Airlines
crash as well. Once again, one name stood out among the many innocents killed for his ties to Hezbollah. This time it was Kassim Tajideen’s brother and business partner Hassan, who was flying back to Africa with four employees from Arosfram, the food import company he owned. Speaking to the press at “the Hezbollah equivalent of a state funeral,” one of Hassan’s cousins said Hassan “had been living in Africa for over 30 years. He was a very successful businessman, with ties to Hezbollah, a movement he strongly supported.”
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The extent of that support became clear later that year, when the Treasury Department targeted two more Tajideen brothers—Ali and Husayn—as Hezbollah financiers, designating them and several of their companies, including Arosfram.
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Described as “two of Hizballah’s top financiers in Africa,” the two brothers ran a multinational network that generated millions of dollars for Hezbollah, according to the US Treasury. The businesses targeted by the Treasury Department were located as far afield as The Gambia, Sierra Leone, the DRC, Angola, the British Virgin Islands, and Lebanon. Treasury added that Ali alone provided huge cash payments to Hezbollah, in amounts as large as $1 million. And while he was apparently a major donor to Hezbollah, Ali Tajideen was no mere fundraiser, Treasury stressed; he was also “a former Hizballah commander” in Lebanon.
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Treasury noted that the Tajideen brothers’ multinational network, beyond fund-raising, “secures strategic geographical strongholds for Hizballah.” The statement, strangely ambiguous at first, makes sense as one reads further into Treasury’s press statement, where Ali Tajideen is noted as “a major player” in Jihad al-Binna, or Construction Jihad, the construction company formed and operated by Hezbollah and designated as a terrorist entity by Treasury in 2007.
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The Lebanese press also noted Ali’s ties to Jihad al-Binna, describing him as the head of the construction company in southern Lebanon.
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In this capacity, several scholars later noted, he played a key role in Hezbollah’s efforts to buy up swaths of real estate in Druze and Christian areas in Lebanon. Al-Binna’s goal was to help Hezbollah build geographic continuity among Shi’a areas and to establish “security zones” in which Hezbollah constructed training camps.
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Jihad al-Binna selects projects “based on political considerations that serve the overall objectives of Hezbollah,” according to a 1999 UN report.
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Treasury explained in its February 2007 designation of the firm, “Jihad al-Bina receives direct funding from Iran, is run by Hezbollah members, and is overseen by Hezbollah’s Shura Council.”
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The Tajideen brothers reportedly engaged in similar behavior using one of their companies, Tajco Company LLC, “as the primary entity to purchase and develop properties in Lebanon on behalf of Hizballah,” according to the US government. Under the company’s name, Treasury reported, Ali Tajideen developed the properties and established mortgage loans. His brother Husayn owned half the company and served as its managing director.
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According to longtime Hezbollah watcher Nicholas Blanford, Ali Tajideen was reportedly paid top dollar for each square meter of land, often paying sellers’ initial asking price in cash. The land purchases were near a new highway built by an Iran-funded nongovernmental organization (NGO) that replaced a potholed road running between Jezzine and the southern Bekaa
Valley—traversing precisely the security pockets where Hezbollah was said to be building Shi’a communities aimed at linking Shi’a communities in the east near Nabatiyah with others in the west.
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Also designated by the Treasury Department in 2010 were six other companies, including a supermarket chain in The Gambia, an import company in the DRC, a trading company in the British Virgin Islands, and a holding company, a food import company, and a retail store in Angola.
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In September 2011, Angola’s foreign migration office expelled 140 foreign nationals, including sixteen Lebanese, on suspicions of involvement in terrorism and money laundering. Four members of the Tajideen family, including Ali, were arrested because of their ties to Hezbollah.
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Alongside his own business activities, Husayn Tajideen was described by the Treasury Department as “a primary Hizballah fundraiser and prominent Hizballah supporter in The Gambia.”
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A year later, the Treasury Department exposed another Hezbollah money laundering scheme in The Gambia (see
chapter 11
). In this case, drug proceeds were used to purchase used cars in the United States that were then shipped to West Africa, among other destinations. These transactions were facilitated through the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) and its subsidiaries, including Prime Bank Limited, a private commercial bank in The Gambia. LCB owned 51 percent of Prime Bank, with the remainder owned by local and Lebanese partners, according to LCB’s 2009 annual report. According to information released by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, one of those other owners is “a Lebanese individual known to be a supporter of Hezbollah.”
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In another case, FBI agents recruited a cooperating witness who helped them document Hezbollah’s criminal activities spanning from Benin, Africa, to Pennsylvania, Lebanon, and Venezuela’s Margarita Island.
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For Hezbollah experts, the geographic reach fit a long-standing pattern.

Tactics used by Hezbollah and Amal to raise funds from Lebanese communities in Africa have included “appealing to their religious convictions, appealing to their Lebanese identity or using threats and even outright violence,” according to one NGO report.
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For those expatriates who have resisted solicitations to support various groups back home, including Hezbollah, the response has often been attacks on commercial properties by organized groups of Lebanese thugs.
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The more continuous expense for legitimate Shi’a businessmen involves “taxes” levied by Hezbollah, with payment enforced through Chicago-style racketeering.

“At least once a year,” sources interviewed by Doug Farah explained, “senior Hezbollah operatives travel through the region collecting the ‘donations’ to be returned to Beirut.”
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According to one US study, “with the aid of extensive social intelligence networks in Lebanon and abroad, Hezbollah knows which Lebanon-based families have diaspora relatives.” While some of the money is used to support Hezbollah networks in Africa, the study noted, most of the extorted cash is “probably
remitted or hand-carried to Hezbollah central in Lebanon.”
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Carrying the cash home on chartered flights, Hezbollah couriers avoid banking regulations and the potential financial scrutiny of law enforcement authorities. And annually or semiannually, Farah found, Hezbollah officials inform Lebanese businesses across West Africa just how much their contribution should be, based on an assessment of each business’s expected earnings. That Hezbollah is in a position to make such assessments signals how institutionalized its enforced donation program has become.
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In some parts of Africa, Lebanese businessmen have historically controlled large segments of particular industries, thus making shakedowns an especially lucrative way of raising funds. While most Lebanese were middle-class traders, Lebanese communities also included a small number of multimillionaires in import-export, manufacturing, and agro-industrial companies. Consider some examples, as described in a 1988 CIA intelligence report. Lebanese in the Ivory Coast owned about 70 percent of the gas stations and a quarter of the grocery stores in Abidjan. Next door, in Liberia, Lebanese dominated Monrovia’s retail sector, where they owned some 500 businesses, including restaurants, hotels, and cement and furniture factories. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the close political connections of one prominent member of the Lebanese community in Sierra Leone, Nabih Berri’s friend Jamil Mohamed, allowed him to “exercise relatively unchecked control over the lucrative diamond and fishing industries,” according to the CIA. (Jamil later fled the country following allegations he funded a coup attempt against the government.) In the former Zaire, a small community of some 7,000 Lebanese reportedly controlled some 40 percent of the commercial business in the capital. In the Central African Republic, the Lebanese community of just 4,800 members had “a near monopoly” on ownership of pharmacies and bakeries and owned several of the country’s largest factories.
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In 1988, when Hezbollah as a movement was still somewhat small and vying with Amal for dominance within the Shi’a community, US intelligence anticipated that “competition between Amal and Hizballah for the allegiance of Africa’s Lebanese will remain intense.” Though Amal collected more funds in Africa than Hezbollah at the time, the CIA assessed that if Hezbollah were to gain the upper hand in Lebanon—as it ultimately did—a majority of the Lebanese in Africa would support the group. Some of this support might be willing, but the CIA anticipated much would be compelled. If Hezbollah were to overtake Amal back home, the CIA projected, “we believe that a majority of Lebanese in Africa, seeking to protect remaining family and business interests in Lebanon, probably would believe they had no choice but to side with Hizballah.”
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Fast-forward to 2000, when a European Union official pointed out how Hezbollah pressures Lebanese in Africa to contribute to its cause. “Hizbullah is active and deeply involved in many businesses across the region,” he noted. “It is only a small part of the Lebanese community that is sympathetic, but many people contribute to them just to keep Hizbullah off their backs.”
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In 2004, US diplomats in West Africa publicly charged that Hezbollah was “systematically siphoning profits” from the region’s lucrative diamond trade, in part
by threatening Lebanese merchants. The deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Sierra Leone was emphatic: “One thing that’s incontrovertible is the financing of Hezbollah.” Citing interviews by embassy staff with the targets of Hezbollah racketeering schemes, the deputy mission chief said, “It’s not even an open secret; there is no secret. There’s a lot of social pressure and extortionate pressure brought to bear: ‘You had better support our cause, or we’ll visit your people back home.’”
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