Editor’s Note: For more on the links between tobacco trafficking and transnational violent organizations, see here, here, and here.
From: Gulf News | Morocco
Intertwined: Cigarette smuggling and militancy
Links between tobacco smuggling and extremist groups are strong, depending on the country, says expert
Omar Shariff, Deputy GCC/Middle East Editor
***
So, how strong are the links between cigarette smuggling and terrorism? Dr Dalia Ghanem Yazbeck, Resident Scholar at Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, believes links between smuggling and extremist groups are strong, depending on the country. In an interview with Gulf News, she said: “For a region such as the Sahel, groups such as the former Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), now called Jamma’at Nusr Al Islam Wal Muslimeen (JNIM), these links are strong. The group took advatange of the conditions in the Sahel and of the already existing smuggling roots, to enhance its financial capabilities. JNIM, for instance, did not take part directly in the smuggling of drugs and cigarettes but takes a tax from the smugglers to protect their convoys, hide their products and so on … There are also trafficking routes in Lebanon, northern Iraq, and Turkey.”
One of the best known cases of extremists smuggling cigarettes to finance their activities is that of the Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who was recently sentenced to death in absentia by Algeria. So prolific were Belmokhtar’s activities that he earned the nickname ‘Mr Marlboro’. He has been reported dead many times, most recently in a US drone strike in Libya this June. Among the attacks blamed on him, the deadliest was the assault on an internationally run Algerian gas plant in January 2015.
