Editor’s Note: Drugs are not all that’s being smuggled by violent Islamist groups. These same terrorist organizations also smuggle cigarettes. See here, here, here, and here for additional discussion of cigarette smuggling by African and West Asian-based Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
From: The Guardian
Militant groups paying west African drivers up to £8,600 to transport cocaine to Europe under noses of UN peacekeepers
Alex Duval Smith in Timbuktu
Islamist groups in northern Mali are paying local drivers to smuggle drugs and migrants across the desert for shipment to Europe, according to sources in Timbuktu.
Smuggling operations are the financial backbone of Islamist groups such as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim). Their total territorial and economic control of the vast, hostile Sahara region is dwarfing the impact of western military efforts, despite dozens of French bombing raids and the deployment of close to 10,000 United Nations peacekeepers in Mali.
On Sunday, a new armed group calling itself the Caliphate Soldiers in Algeria (Jound al Khilafa fi Ard al Jazayer) announced it had split with Aqim and sworn loyalty to Islamic State (Isis), fighting in Syria and Iraq.
On the same day, a Chadian peacekeeper was killed and four others were injured when their patrol vehicle hit a remote-controlled device near Aguelhok, close to the Algerian border with northern Mali. He was the eighth peacekeeper to be killed since the end of June, following a surge of rocket, suicide bomb and landmine attacks, against nine during the entire first year of the UN deployment in Mali.
