The Hezbollah creed: “We are the children of the faction of God and we see ourselves as an integral part of the Muslim world, challenged by a most arrogant imperialist assault from the West and the East, with the aim of nullifying the gracious Muslim prophetic charge received by Allah. Allah has given it grace so that it can become the best community that has ever appeared on the earth: it prescribes good and dissuades from evil, and believes in Allah.”
“We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.”
“Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore, our struggle will end only when this entity is OBLITERATED. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease-fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.” Israel is “the ‘imperialist power’ which planted a ‘foreign entity in the region…a cancer that is propagated in the body of the Arab and Islamic umma (typically a single group of common religious beliefs) in order to reduce it to pieces, divide it and control its resources.”
Historical Summary of Hezbollah in Lebanon
The Shia Muslim Iran-proxy Hezbollah (“Party of God”) emerged amid the chaos of the Lebanese civil war as a guerilla terrorist group. It has now grown to become a national political entity, a social welfare unit, and a state-like military organization.
Slowly but surely, and inconspicuously, Hezbollah has increased its political power and status within Lebanon. It has gained growing influence over Lebanon, careful to maintain the rules of the Lebanese political order. The group has, in fact, become so entrenched in the political system that it now demands increased decision-making power within Lebanon. In June 2017, after great efforts on the part of Hezbollah officials, the Lebanese parliament passed a new electoral law that significantly increased Hezbollah’s power in parliament and further secured its representation. However, Hezbollah’s plan is to remain a separate and autonomous armed group with its weapons in the name of “resistance.”
Following the 1982 war between the PLO and Israel in south Lebanon, Hezbollah grew and established its strength and prominence by conducting a series of terror attacks against Israel.
Following the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon on May 24, 2000, Hezbollah became almost a state within a state in south Lebanon.
By 2005, Syria completely withdrew its forces from Lebanon, leaving a power vacuum. Then, in 2006, Hezbollah provoked Israel into a full-scale war in south Lebanon after abducting two Israeli soldiers. After 34 days of fighting, the UN brokered a ceasefire by its Security Council Resolution 1701 which established a no-man zone in south Lebanon that disallowed both Israeli and Hezbollah forces from entering. This was in addition to the UN Security Council Resolution 1559, passed in 2004, which called for the disarmament of all armed militias, as well as their cooperation in allowing the Lebanese State to assert its sovereignty in a free and functioning political system.
However, not only did Hezbollah refuse to give up its weapons but it has systematically increased arms and ammunition throughout south Lebanon since 2006. It has continuously used its weapons to eliminate political rivals as much as possible and impose its will on the Lebanese people and the government. In addition to receiving arms transfers from Iran, Hezbollah is also building infrastructure for independent arms production within Lebanon.
At the end of the 2006 war against Israel, the UN Security Council Resolution 1701 cease-fire agreement called for Hezbollah to immediately stop all attacks and for Israel to cease all offensive military operations. In addition, it set guidelines for both parties, under certain conditions, to refrain from hostilities and maintain stability. Whereas Israel kept the conditions of the agreement, Hezbollah overtly and consistently violated and continues violating the terms agreed upon in the resolution.
In December 2018, IDF forces uncovered an extensive network of underground terror tunnels crossing the Blue Line (a demarcation line dividing Lebanon from Israel and the Golan Heights, published by the United Nations on 7 June 2000 for the purposes of determining whether Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanon.) This was in clear violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Hezbollah dug these tunnels with the intent of carrying out surprise attacks and kidnappings of Israeli civilians and soldiers. During Operation Northern Shield, the IDF successfully exposed and neutralized these tunnels.
Hezbollah Sabotages the Work of UNIFIL
UNIFIL (UN peacekeeping forces) is supposed to enforce the resolution. However, Hezbollah works in various ways to disrupt the activity of UNIFIL which renders it helpless against Hezbollah militant operations and intelligence gathering or transferring arms. Hezbollah’s influence over the Lebanese government and army is growing steadily.
The means by which Hezbollah increased its control in Lebanon:
- In the financial system: in order to evade monitoring of money transfers, Hezbollah consistently works to weaken the Lebanese banking system by means of deterrence and influence over top bankers, usually of Shiite origins.
- Border crossings: In order to evade monitoring of arms transfers, Hezbollah maintains a network of influence over various border crossings, including Hariri Airport, Beirut Seaport, and the customs authority.
- In local municipalities: Through Hezbollah-affiliated mayors and Mukhtars (heads of villages), Hezbollah consolidates its influence over public services, civilian infrastructure, and its own public outreach.
Increasing Influence Over the Lebanese Armed Forces
Hezbollah holds great power within the decision-making bodies that are responsible for overseeing the security apparatus and state-sanctioned use of force, as well as deciding on matters of war and peace.
It was revealed that Hezbollah had planted an officer in the LAF (Lebanese Armed Forces) in order to ensure its continued influence over the army.
The organization’s further infiltration into army ranks was revealed in 2017 when Hezbollah tanks were photographed fighting side by side with LAF tanks.
Hezbollah is Not Just a Terrorist Organization in South Lebanon.
A leading American DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) official revealed after years of investigating the Lebanese Hezbollah organization that Hezbollah uses money laundering, the drug trade, and a large corporation of used cars in Africa to raise huge amounts of money for their wicked operations.
Of 68 groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the United States, the DEA has linked 25 of those to drug trafficking or some role in the drug trade.
Out of criminal terrorist organizations such as Lebanese Hezbollah, the Taliban, ISIS, and Colombia’s FARC and ELN, Hezbollah stands out uniquely for its hierarchal leadership, sophisticated intelligence operations, and having political and military wings.
Hezbollah, a major proxy for Iran, receives the majority of its support from Iran. However, to increase its revenue, Hezbollah has increasingly turned to criminal enterprises. They operate in the Shia Crescent (areas under Iranian influence or control that include Iran itself, Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, western Afghanistan, and the Houthis in Yemen,) and Russia. Hezbollah taps into global money launderers, arms traffickers, and drug traffickers on six continents.
The type of criminal activity conducted by Hezbollah’s networks varies from continent to continent, but in North America, the main operations are money laundering, the used car trade, and drug trafficking — “trafficking coke here whether as transshipment broker or supplier.”
When the U.S. Treasury Department blocked American financial institutions from conducting business with the Lebanese Canadian Bank in 2011, for example, officials alleged that revenue from European and Latin American drug sales was wired by the bank to used car dealers in the United States who shipped huge amounts of cars to West Africa where they were sold; the proceeds went back to Hezbollah.
In South America, Hezbollah has benefited from Islamic extremism and its connections to Colombian cartels and a corrupt Venezuelan government whose regimes of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Madura have facilitated air shipments of cocaine to Syria and helped members of Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps get fraudulent passports. In Mexico, money laundering links were discovered between Hezbollah and Los Zetas.
Although Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and other high-ranking Hezbollah figures deny any criminal allegations and say that drug trafficking would violate Islamic law, investigations show that they operate just as a traditional organized crime organization, like the Mafia or any other drug cartel.
“Nasrallah is a murdering terrorist” — just like Escobar who built orphanages and murdered people and has no problem lying, said one of the DEA agents, “The DEA has discovered cases where Hezbollah criminal activity benefits Iran, as well as the U.S.”
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting Hezbollah’s drug trafficking while it was funneling cocaine into the United States.
The DEA
The DEA was established by President Richard Nixon in 1973 to combine various anti-drug programs under the US Department of Justice. During the Bush administration, thanks to supportive Republicans in Congress, it had become the beneficiary of a new federal law that empowered its agents around the globe to operate virtually anywhere without permission required from other U.S. agencies. All they had to do was connect drug suspects to terrorism, and then arrest them and bring them to the United States in an effort to penetrate the highest levels of the world’s most significant and notorious criminal organizations.
In the investigations, there was enough proof that the terrorist Muslim organization of Hezbollah was no longer just a small Palestinian military and political organization in south Lebanon, focused on fighting Israel, but had grown and spread into an international crime syndicate that, according to some investigators, was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapon trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities for the purchase of weapons. As a result, in 2008, The DEA launched a campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, against the organization network.
Over the next eight years, top-secret DEA agents, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies, used wiretaps, undercover operations, and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks.
They followed cocaine shipments – some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the flow of cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa where Hezbollah uses the funds to purchase weapons. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran. While the pursuit may be shadowed in secrecy, from Latin American luxury hotels to car parks in Africa to the banks and battlefields of the Middle East, its impact is not a secret: the discovery of multi-ton loads of cocaine entering the United States, and hundreds of millions of dollars going to a U.S. designated terrorist organization.
But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the Hezbollah conspiracy, the Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participant agents, who in many cases, spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for certain significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests, and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered, or rejected their requests.
The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran; a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits and a central player in a U.S-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force.
The State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested. This was the extent to which competing agendas among government agencies and shifting priorities at the highest levels have set back years of progress.
Normalizing Hezbollah in Lebanon Government
Obama had entered office in 2009 promising to improve relations with Iran as part of a broader conciliation with the Muslim world. On his campaign trail, Obama had repeatedly criticized Bush’s failing policy of pressuring Iran to stop its illicit nuclear program and said that he would reach out to Tehran in diplomacy. Obama saw an opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries through direct dialogue. To appease Iran, the plan was not to go against Hezbollah but the assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system and to find ways to build up “moderate elements” within Hezbollah.
According to reports from DEA agents, during the Obama administration, the DEA project took a back seat to a deal with Iran. To make the nuclear deal with Iran, Project Cassandra was halted just as it was approaching the arrest of criminals in the upper echelon of Hezbollah and while Hezbollah was continuing its illicit activities around the world, including funneling cocaine into the United States. This was confirmed by a testimony of a former Obama administration Treasury official. According to Project Cassandra members and others, “investigations were tampered down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.” In addition, they said Obama was reluctant to give the green light to aggressively act against top Hezbollah operatives due to his envisioning a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, along with his desire for a negotiated settlement for Iran’s nuclear program.
The administration also rejected repeated efforts by Project Cassandra members to charge Hezbollah’s military wing as an ongoing criminal enterprise under a federal Mafia-style racketeering statute. Administration officials declined to designate Hezbollah as a “significant transnational criminal organization” and blocked other strategic initiatives that would have given the task force additional legal tools, money, and manpower to fight it.
Nevertheless, Obama’s vision to build up “moderate elements” within Hezbollah has failed. It remains a dangerous militant terror organization. Hezbollah continues to evolve from just another terrorist organization in south Lebanon into a strong militia and a political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet. Hezbollah is now an international multi-million-dollar mafia-like organization.
Image: Photo by René Ranisch on Unsplash
