“Forming”? I have been looking at transnational terrorism for quite some time and I can say we definitively saw this ‘forming’ in 2000. When Interopol’s Assistant Director of their Criminal Intelligence Directorate came to the US to testify before the House subcommittee on Crime we get such lovely bits as this (lengthy quote to follow):
“Strategic Alliances between Crime Groups: the Colombian Nexus
The strategies devised by Colombian drug cartels merit a discussion in further detail. Over the years, these criminal entities have formed numerous alliances with other criminal groups in order to extend the scope of their illicit business. Their rational, and, incidentally, highly successful strategic decision making has led to providing them with a more global reach. The presence of terrorist groups in the area explains the obvious link between drugs and the arms trade in that region.
Generally speaking, the formation of alliances can be viewed as a response by a particular firm or company to overcome its own limitations. With the emergence of global markets, alliances are becoming a necessity for almost any business. Each firm has something that the other needs or wants, such as knowledge of a certain market or an established distribution network. Drug cartels, although an illegitimate business, are forming alliances with other organized criminal groups around the world to extend their operations and conquer new markets.
In order to smuggle their illicit products into the U.S., Colombian drug cartels began forming alliances with Mexican groups, who have a well-developed smuggling infrastructure for transporting drugs across the vast border with the United States. As Mexicans began to charge more for their services, Colombians established relationships with various Dominican, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and African-American groups which act as smugglers and retailers for Colombian wholesale cocaine. Colombians have also formed an alliance with some of the Nigerian drug trafficking groups based on product exchange. In the early 1990s, Nigerian groups supplied heroin to Colombian drug traffickers in exchange for cocaine. Colombians were able to develop their own heroin market, while Nigerians started selling cocaine in Western Europe. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, an important alliance was formed between Colombian drug cartels and the Sicilian Mafia. Since the cocaine market in the U.S. was saturated, and because cocaine could be sold with higher profit margins in Europe, Colombians wanted to enter the European drug market. The Cosa Nostra’s well established heroin network was easily applicable to cocaine. In addition, the Sicilians had an excellent knowledge of European conditions and were able to neutralize law enforcement officials through bribery and corruption more effectively than the Colombians. From the Sicilian perspective, the alliance with Colombians was an opportunity to regain part of the market that had been lost to Chinese heroin traffickers. In recent years, South American drug cartels have been forming alliances with East European/Russian Organized Crime Groups in order to support and diversify their operations. East European groups have offered drug cartels access to sophisticated weapons that were previously not available. Helicopters, surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, and even submarines are on the drug cartels’ “shopping list.” The East European groups provided new drug markets in Russia, the former Soviet Republics, and Eastern Europe, while consumption was decreasing in the U.S. In 1993, Russian police intercepted a ton of South American cocaine which had been shipped to St. Petersburg by one Russian crime syndicate working with a Colombian drug cartel. In another example, a Russian crime leader was arrested in January 1997 in Miami by U.S. agents for the exportation of cocaine from Ecuador to St. Petersburg (Russia) and then to the United States. In exchange for these services, drug cartels pay for transactions with high quality cocaine. East European/Russian crime syndicates and corrupt military officers are supplying sophisticated weapons to Colombian rebels in exchange for huge shipments of cocaine. Although the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) receives most of the arms, some of them are distributed to Hezbollah factions.”
That is only one excerpt from lengthy testimony, which also ties al Qaeda to Albanian Mafia and the GIA, plus those interconnects with the older Mafias and the Russian and Eastern European Mafias. We can reliably finger *when* this started by following one of the major individuals who created the interconnects between organized crime, the narcotics trade, terrorism, and money laundering: the guy we are extraditing from Spain Monzer al-Kassar. His involvement with Iran/Contra gave him entree to Central and South America and from that to Carlos Menem and setting up his own terror/INTEL organization there with Syrian and Iranian help. One of the prime individuals he used to help in this was Imad Mugniyah, prior to bin Laden the man responsible for the most loss of American lives by terrorism. By utilizing Kassar’s oversight of the Bekaa valley drug trade and his narcotics trafficking networks into the US, he married up capability and trade for S. American cocaine trade back to Europe. Add in his already known arms running past international blockades in Bosnia and Somalia, and you have someone with the breadth and depth of contacts to have gotten transnational terrorism off on the right footing for distributed income via the drug trade.
“Forming”? If you are only *now* realizing this, then you are in for a rude surprise as transnational terrorism of the islamic sort takes on a hispanic face. It is already in the Caribbean and the first Islamic coup in the western hemisphere was in Trinidad. Those groups have already formed allegiances with terrorist organizations that are global in scope and use their own cocaine trade to bolster them financially. One of the more recent groups was investigated as it looked to be planning to hijack a liquid natural gas container ship and do something with it in a city along the US eastern seaboard. Mind you they are only ‘amateurs’.
Not to worry, if Kassar steps foot in the US, we will see what professional and untraceable terrorism looks like here at home.
