Hezbollah (61 page)

In 2003, the NGO Global Witness determined, “There is already widespread understanding within the diamond industry and among governments that groups such as Hizbullah—who wield considerable influence over certain sectors of the diamond trading community—use the diamond trade to obtain funds.”
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According to the report, the “open secret” of Hezbollah diamond trading activity occurred across the continent, including in Angola, Burkina Faso, Congo, the DRC, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Namibia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
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Not only are diamonds a sound investment, but buying diamonds mined in conflict zones enables less scrupulous investors to make an especially good return on their investment. Diamonds are also ideal for hiding, moving, and laundering cash. “Diamonds don’t set off alarms at airports, they can’t be sniffed by dogs, they are easy to hide, and are highly convertible to cash. It makes perfect sense,” as one US official put it.
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And while the barriers to entry into the diamond business are high, groups like Hezbollah have been able to leverage relationships with businessmen who have overcome these barriers to gain access to the market. Such concerns led the US State Department to report to Congress in 2002 that “reports that terrorists may be buying and hoarding diamonds are cause for immense concern.”
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Hezbollah is believed to have raised significant funds by dealing in so-called conflict diamonds in the 1980s and 1990s and even as recently as 2003. In their testimonies before the US Senate on the links between conflict diamonds and terrorism, the former US ambassador to Sierra Leone, Joseph Melrose Jr., and the former Sierra Leonean ambassador to the United States, John Leigh, confirmed that diamonds mined in Sierra Leone finance the activities of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and al-Qaeda.
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In 2003, David Crane, the American prosecutor for the Special Court in Sierra Leone, concluded, “Diamonds fuel the war on terrorism. [Liberian President] Charles Taylor is harboring terrorists from the Middle East, including al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, and has been for years.”
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Given the central role of the city of Antwerp in the global diamond trade, it should not surprise that Belgian authorities took a particular interest in the issue of terrorist abuse of the diamond trade in general, and through the sale of blood diamonds in particular. A July 2000 Belgian military intelligence report, which addressed diamond smuggling from Angola to Antwerp, concluded, “There are indications that certain persons, the “Lebanese connection” mentioned in the diamond smuggling file, also put in an appearance in files on money laundering, the drugs trade and the
financing of Lebanese terrorist organizations such as Amal and Hezbollah. This finding gives a whole new dimension to the issue of diamond smuggling, we are NO longer dealing simply with white-collar crime [emphasis in the original].”
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Though the start of the Angolan civil war (1975–2002) predated Hezbollah and its movement into the African diamond smuggling business, the group was well positioned to exploit the conflict and reportedly continued doing so despite international sanctions. Again, it was Belgian intelligence that “identified several Lebanese diamond traders as having links with Hizbullah and as having bought diamonds from UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) before and after the imposition of the UN embargo in July 1988.”
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Between 1992 and 1998, the State Department reported, UNITA exported between $3 and $4 billion worth of diamonds.
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Global Witness further noted that, according to the Belgian report, some of the same Lebanese diamond traders and companies were also tied to organized crime, money laundering, and drug trafficking. One such company was reportedly knee-deep in trading banned Angolan diamonds obtained from UNITA. The revenues from its diamond sales “were apparently transferred via Switzerland to Lebanon, Iran and Syria,” according to Global Witness and the Belgian intelligence report.
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Later, when the United Nations investigated violations of the Angola sanctions, a collection of five Western and African intelligence agencies all “pointed to the involvement of a Lebanese diamond trading network that was buying diamonds from UNITA before and after the imposition of sanctions in July 1998.” One Lebanese diamond trader cited in the Belgian report, whose family was reported to be “connected with Shi’ite organizations, in particular Hezbollah,” was Imad Bakri. Interestingly, press reports identified his brother, Yousef, as one of eleven Lebanese diamond dealers executed for their alleged roles in the assassination of President Laurent Kabila in the DRC in January 2001. Hezbollah reportedly pressured the DRC government to return the bodies to Lebanon, suggesting some or all of the accused Lebanese plotters had ties to the group.
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Nor were Hezbollah’s ties to conflict diamonds limited to Angola. According to a former US official with firsthand experience following Hezbollah activity in Africa, Sierra Leone has become “Hezbollah’s center of gravity” in Africa.
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In large part, blood diamonds explain why.

For more than a decade starting in 1991, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel army renowned for fielding child soldiers and committing gross crimes against humanity, fought the central government in Sierra Leone with the generous support of Liberian president Charles Taylor. The RUF mined the diamond fields under its control, and reportedly used Lebanese diamond traders with ties to Hezbollah as middlemen.

Douglas Farah, whose 2001
Washington Post
reports highlighted Hezbollah and al-Qaeda ventures in African conflict diamonds, identified the RUF’s principal diamond dealer as Ibrahim Bah, a former Senegalese rebel–turned–Islamist militant. In the 1980s, Bah trained with Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and fought with the group in southern Lebanon before returning to Libya, where he met and
befriended a variety of African militants. From 1987 to 1988, Bah was in Afghanistan, training at a jihadi camp near Khost and fighting in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. At one point during these early years of his militant career, Bah also served as a bodyguard to Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi. By the end of the 1980s, Bah was back in Africa fighting for Charles Taylor—one of the people with whom he trained in Libya—and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia.
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In July 2000, a small-time diamond dealer, Ali Darwish, earned $50,000 for introducing Bah to Hezbollah supporter Aziz Nassour, Farah reported. Bah then contracted Nassour to manage large quantities of diamonds on behalf of RUF and al-Qaeda.
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By 2001, intelligence sources and associates identified Bah as “a conduit between senior RUF commanders and the buyers from both al Qaeda and Hezbollah.”
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Among the Lebanese businessmen with whom Bah worked, Aziz Nassour and Sammy Ossailly were identified as two of his “key brokers.” Together, the three men signed a three-year lease on a four-bedroom house in Monrovia to be used as a safe house. There, in rooms decorated with Hezbollah posters and pictures of Osama bin Laden, the Senegalese hired to staff the safe house were said to watch videos of Hezbollah suicide attacks on Israeli troops.
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Starting in the late 1990s, an intelligence source told the
Washington Post
, the Congo in particular saw an influx of “hard-core Islamist extremists” in what was described as a new “Wild West.” The intelligence source acknowledged “we know Hezbollah is here, we know other groups are here, but they can probably operate a long time before we know enough to stop them.”
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Shortly after Farah ran his first story on this issue in November 2001, the regional security officer at the US embassy in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where Farah was living, shared with him two lines of a classified cable reporting credible threats against Farah’s life for reporting the story. The next day Farah’s editor received another warning from a different country’s intelligence service that individuals were planning “to take care of the
Washington Post
reporter.” A source of Farah’s informed him further that Ibrahim Bah planned to plant drugs on Farah at the airport, forcing Farah and his family to be escorted onto their flight home by US embassy security personnel.
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Aziz Nassour and Sammy Ossailly’s activities as blood diamond smugglers who pay for the stones with weapons used to fuel war in Africa are further documented in a Belgian police slide presentation. Marked “For Police Use Only,” the presentation focuses on the two operatives’ activities from 1999 to January 2002. Filled with detailed link-analysis charts and including handwritten notes and lists of weapons, the presentation is compelling.
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In October 2002, Belgian Federal Police provided two different FBI field offices with information regarding the diamond smuggling activities of Sammy Ossailly and Aziz Nassour.
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At one point, Belgian investigators sought the assistance of their American counterparts when one of the individuals they were investigating was found to be staying at a hotel in Miami.
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Expelled from Angola in 1998 after having been accused of helping UNITA, Nassour moved to Marbella, Spain, where he worked with Mohammed Derbah, a reported Amal member involved in weapons trafficking. In late 2001, Spanish authorities arrested Derbah “for involvement in arms trafficking and financing
Hizballah and AMAL.” Seventeen additional people were arrested with Derbah, all tied to a Canary Islands–based ring associated with Amal and Hezbollah and involved in fraud, money laundering, forgery, and extortion. Two years later, Derbah was arrested again, this time for money laundering. The group, which Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon linked to Amal and Hezbollah, netted more than $10 million a year, primarily through an especially lucrative time-share scheme targeting German and British citizens.
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In 2002, both Nassour and Ossailly were arrested, this time in Belgium, and convicted of illicit diamond smuggling in 2003.
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But even as authorities investigated their activities, others stepped in to keep Hezbollah’s diamond pipeline intact. Another person whose company Belgian intelligence suspected of “possibly being connected to Hizballah” was Abdallah Ezziddeen. In spring 2002, Ezziddeen reportedly tried to buy a diamond-prospecting concession on the Namibian coast near South Africa. But when meeting with the owners of the concession, he expressed little interest in its production potential—he just wanted to buy in immediately. The exchange raised authorities’ suspicions that Ezziddeen’s interest may not have been in the excavation of Namibian diamonds per se, but in the ability to smuggle blood diamonds mined illegally elsewhere into Namibia and register them as having been found in Namibia. A common practice among illicit diamond smugglers, the scheme enables smugglers to declare and then legally export diamonds that would otherwise be subject to sanctions and strict export controls. Hearing news of the possible concession sale, Israeli security consultants reportedly met with the sellers and expressed a keen interest in Ezziddeen and the prospect of the sale going through. The sale did not go through, but Hezbollah’s reach into the African diamond industry persisted.
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As recently as September 2006, a senior State Department counterterrorism official testifying about Hezbollah’s global reach noted that “Lebanese traders are also very active in diamond exports, both as a business and in criminal exploitation.”
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In 2008, when reports emerged that Hezbollah might be targeting Israeli businessmen in Africa, Israeli diamond merchants were not surprised. “The big problem for Israelis in West Africa,” an Israeli in the diamond business commented, “is that there are countries whose diamond industry is controlled by Lebanese locals, a majority of whom openly support Hezbollah.”
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US officials confirmed the gist of the Israeli businessman’s fears when, in December 2011, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York filed a forfeiture action and civil money laundering complaint against the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB), several money-exchange houses and other companies, and thirty US used car purchasers and dealerships. The civil action, based on a detailed Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation, found that among the Hezbollah-affiliated entities with which the Lebanese bank did business was a Belgian diamond trader of Lebanese origin named Ibrahim Ahmad. According to a UN panel of experts, the civil complaint noted, a company in which Ahmad was a principal purchased $150 million in diamonds from the DRC in 2001. Ahmad’s clan, the UN report noted, had ties to Hezbollah and was involved in counterfeiting, money laundering
, and diamond smuggling.
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As auditors combed through the LCB’s accounts, they found almost 200 accounts that, according to US officials, “appeared to add up to a giant money-laundering operation, with Hezbollah smack in the middle.” At the center of many of the complex transactions they uncovered was one common theme: companies trading diamonds.
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Committed to its constitutional directive to export the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) proactively recruits Shi’a in Africa by tapping the efforts of Iranian and Lebanese missionaries proselytizing across the continent. One of the most prominent clerics to come has been Sheikh Abdul-Munam Azzain, a former student of Ayatollah Khomeini who opened a Shi’a Islamic Center in Dakar, Senegal, in 1978. In Nigeria, Sheikh Ibrahim Alzakzaky has been described as “a protégé of Iran [who] is involved in disseminating Shiite theology and creating a radical socio-economic and military system that resembles that of Hezbollah in Lebanon.”
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