Hezbollah (66 page)

165.
Ibid., 61; US CIA, “Al-Qa’ida in Sudan, 1992–96.”

166.
US CIA, “Al-Qa’ida in Sudan, 1992–96.”

167.
United States of America v. Ali Mohamed
, Guilty Plea in US Embassy Bombings, Criminal No. 1023, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, October 20, 2000.

168.
Ibid.

169.
“Wikileaks: Sudan Designates Hezbollah as a Terrorist Organization,”
Sudan Tribune
, September 8, 2011.

170.
Ibid.

171.
“Sudan Says Rebels May Have Assisted Hezbollah in Arms Smuggling,”
Sudan Tribune
, April 20, 2009.

172.
Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, “Hamas and Hezbollah Expressed Sympathy with President of Sudan,” July 25, 2010.

173.
Talal Ismail, “Hezbollah Places Army at the Disposal of Government in Darfur,”
Al-Ahram
(Sudan), September 23, 2010.

174.
“Wikileaks: Sudan Designates Hezbollah.”

175.
US Department of State, “Country Reports on Terrorism 2010,” August 18, 2011.

176.
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,
9/11 Commission Report
, released July 22, 2004, 240–41.

177.
Edith M. Lederer, “UN: W. Africa Cocaine Trade Generates $900M a Year,” Associated Press, February 22, 2010.

178.
Statement of James Clapper,
Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community
, February 10, 2011.

179.
US Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, “International Narcotics Control Strategy Report,”
Drug and Chemical Control
1, March 2010, 312–14.

180.
Marco Vernaschi, “Guinea Bissau: Hezbollah, al Qaida and the Lebanese Connection,” Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (Washington, DC), June 19, 2009.

181.
Ronald K. Noble, opening remarks, 20th Americas Regional Conference, Viña del Mar, Chile, April 1, 2009.

182.
Ronald K. Noble, keynote speech, 9th Meeting of the West African Police Chiefs Committee, Accra, Ghana, October 3, 2007.

183.
US Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Designates Two Narcotics Traffickers in Guinea-Bissau; Treasury Targets Emerging West African Narcotics Transit Route,” press release, April 8, 2010.

184.
Robert Booth, “Wikileaks Cables: US Fears Over West African Cocaine Route,”
Guardian
(London), December 14, 2010.

185.
Marco Vernaschi, “The Cocaine Coast,”
Virginia Quarterly Review
87, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 43–65.

186.
Statement of Michael A. Braun,
Confronting Drug Trafficking in West Africa
.

187.
Michael Braun, “Drug Trafficking and Middle Eastern Terrorism Groups: A Growing Nexus?” PolicyWatch 1392, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (Washington, DC), July 25, 2008.

188.
Statement of Michael A. Braun,
Confronting Drug Trafficking in West Africa
.

189.
Adm. James Stavridis, “U.S. Southern Command 2009 Posture Statement,” US Southern Command, 2009, 15; see also Adm. James G. Stavridis,
Partnership for the Americas: Western Hemisphere Strategy and U.S. Southern Command
(Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2010), 11.

190.
“Hezbollah Will Profit from the Cocaine Trade in Europe,”
Der Spiegel
(Germany), January 9, 2010.

191.
United States of America v. Lebanese Canadian Bank SAL et al
., Verified Complaint, 11 CIV 9186, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, December 15, 2011.

192.
Ibid.;
United States v. Maroun Saade et al
., Indictment, 11 Cr. 111 (NRB), United States District Court, Southern District of New York, February 8, 2011.

193.
United States of America v. Lebanese Canadian Bank SAL et al
., Verified Complaint, 11 CIV 9186, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, December 15, 2011.

194.
Jo Becker, “Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing,”
New York Times
, December 13, 2011.

195.
Author interview with West Africa expert, Washington, DC, November 28, 2011.

196.
US CIA, “Prospects for Hizballah Terrorism in Africa.”

Hezbollah in Iraq

IN THE EARLY EVENING OF JANUARY
20, 2007,
American military officers and their Iraqi counterparts met at the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, about thirty miles south of Baghdad, to coordinate security for the upcoming celebrations of the Shi’a holiday of Ashura. It was just after nightfall when a five-car convoy of black GMC Suburban trucks—the preferred vehicles of US government convoys—was waved through three checkpoints approaching the Coordination Center. The trucks carried about a dozen English-speaking men dressed in US military-style fatigues, carrying American-type weapons and fake identity cards. At the checkpoints, Iraqi soldiers assumed the convoy was just another US security team.
¹
It was not.

The assailants, trained to carry out “terrorist-style kidnappings” by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force and Lebanese Hezbollah, knew exactly where American soldiers would be situated on the compound and headed directly there.
²
After they entered the compound, the vehicles split up, with some parking in front and others circling to the back of the main building where the meeting was taking place.
³
Once near American soldiers, the assailants threw grenades and opened fire with automatic rifles. One US soldier was killed and three others were injured by a grenade that was thrown into the Coordination Center’s main office, an upper-floor office that also contained the provincial Iraqi police chief’s office. While some assailants attacked the Coordination Center’s main building, others set off explosives throughout the compound, damaging three US military Humvees. After grabbing two soldiers and an unclassified US military computer inside the compound, the team jumped atop an armored US Humvee, captured two more soldiers, and fled the compound.
⁴
The convoy drove east, crossing into Babil province, where it sped through an Iraqi police checkpoint, prompting police to trail the suspicious vehicles. Continuing east, the convoy crossed the Euphrates River and then turned north toward Hillah. The attackers abandoned the five SUVs near the town of Mahawil and fled. Not far behind, Iraqi police caught up with the abandoned vehicles, where they also found uniforms, boots, radios, a rifle, and the four abducted US soldiers, only one of them still alive. Two of
the soldiers were found in the back of one of the SUVs, handcuffed and shot dead. A third soldier was found dead on the ground, also shot. Nearby, the fourth soldier, who had been shot in the head but was alive, was rushed to the hospital but died on the way there.
⁵

Just days after the attack, Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman for Multi-National Division–Baghdad, said, “The precision of the attack, the equipment used and the possible use of explosives to destroy the military vehicles in the compound suggests that the attack was well rehearsed prior to execution.”
⁶
Bleichwehl’s suspicions were confirmed three months later when Hezbollah operative Ali Moussa Daqduq and Qais al-Khazali, leader of one of the radical Shi’a “Special Groups” that broke away from Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, were captured in southern Iraq on March 20.
⁷
Documents captured with al-Khazali showed that the Qods Force had gathered detailed information on “soldiers’ activities, shift changes and defenses” at the US base in Karbala, “and this information was shared with the attackers.”
⁸
One document seized in the raid in particular caught the attention of US analysts: a twenty-two-page memorandum that “detailed the planning, preparation, approval process and conduct of the [Karbala] operation,” among others.
⁹
Shortly thereafter, the trade magazine
Aviation Week & Space Technology
reported, US spy satellites spotted a training center in Iran complete with a mockup of the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center. “The U.S. believes the discovery indicates Iran was heavily involved in the attack, which relied on a fake motorcade to gain entrance to the compound. The duplicate layout in Iran allowed attackers to practice procedures to use at the Iraqi compound, the Defense Department believes.”
¹⁰

In time, US forces would learn that the attack on the Karbala Provincial Coordination Center was commanded by Sheikh Azhar al-Dulaymi, a Sunni convert to Shi’a Islam and wanted Iraqi militant tied to Qais al-Khazali. Al-Dulaymi, the military learned, was trained by Hezbollah operatives near the city of Qom, Iran, where he learned how to execute military-style, precision kidnappings. The goal was to kidnap US or British military personnel and take the captives to the Shi’ite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad.
¹¹
Although a tactical success, the Karbala operation was a strategic failure, given that the goal had been to kidnap, not kill. And in the aftermath of the attack, coalition forces exposed the extent to which Iranian and Hezbollah agents were involved in training, equipping, organizing, and in some cases directing Shi’a militants in Iraq.

Hezbollah’s activities in Iraq since the 2003 invasion are a function of the group’s close alliance with Iran in general and the Qods Force in particular. Iran’s strategy in Iraq—and Hezbollah’s role in that strategy as Iran’s primary militant proxy group—is a logical extension of its covert activities in Iraq and the region throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In the years following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Tehran regime sponsored terrorist acts both to export the revolution and to further its national interests.
Iran gave special focus to its own backyard, where Shi’a minorities lived under Sunni monarchies that not only oppressed Iran’s co-religionists but also stood in the way of the new regime’s regional ambitions.

Throughout the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), Iraq was a primary target of Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups. To this end, the CIA noted in 1986, “Iran trains and finances several Iraqi dissident groups, such as the Dawa Party, that are dedicated to overthrowing President Saddam Husayn.”
¹²
In 1986, Kuwaiti Shi’a extremists bombed several Kuwaiti oil installations. More Kuwaiti oil installations were targeted six months later, in January 1987, and again in April and May of that year. In July 1987, two brothers blew themselves up while placing an explosive in front of a Kuwait City building housing the Air France ticket office. While the previous year the brothers had told Kuwaiti authorities that they had been abducted by Iran, the truth was that they were being trained in Iran as saboteurs. More attacks occurred over the course of 1987, including bombs that exploded in front of the Pan American Airlines ticket office, the Kuwaiti Ministry of the Interior, and the office of an American-owned insurance company.
¹³

The Qods Force developed several proxy groups not only in Saudi Arabia but throughout the Gulf region as well. Often Iran used the expertise of Lebanese Hezbollah to train recruits from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and elsewhere. In some cases, such as the 1983 Kuwait bombings and the bombing of Khobar Towers, Hezbollah provided explosives and experienced operatives to help carry out specific attacks.

Lebanese Hezbollah and Iraqi Dawa operatives joined together again in a brazen attempt to assassinate the Kuwaiti emir in 1985. That attack was aimed at securing the release of the Kuwait 17, who by then had been sentenced for the 1983 bombings. The attack on the emir’s motorcade occurred just days after Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) sent three letters to Beirut newspapers with pictures of kidnapped westerners held in an effort to get western governments to press Kuwait to release the Kuwait 17. In response to a US public statement rejecting negotiations with the kidnappers, an anonymous caller to a French news agency warned that “the U.S. Government should await the largest military operation it has ever known” and threatened attacks on Kuwaiti diplomats worldwide. A week later, a car filled with explosives rammed the emir’s motorcade.
¹⁴
The emir suffered minor injuries, but three others perished in the explosion.

In 1986, Bahrain cracked down hard on Bahraini Hezbollah, and in 1987, fifty-nine of the group’s members were put on trial. But a decade later, in March 1997, the arrest of thirteen Bahrainis and two Iraqis by the Kuwaiti State Security Service in Kuwait City proved the group was far from beaten. Those arrested apparently had ties to Saudi and Kuwaiti Hezbollah, the Kuwaitis told their Bahraini counterparts, and called themselves “Hezbollah Gulf.” Correspondence seized at the suspects’ homes revealed connections with people in Damascus, Syria, and Qom, Iran. The evidence, Kuwaiti officials stated at the time, suggests the cell may have operated on the directions of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
¹⁵

Moreover, several of the Bahraini Hezbollah’s top leaders were reportedly living in Kuwait. According to the CIA, Muhammad Habib Mansur Saffaf was “one of the group’s top leaders” living in Kuwait City. “He reportedly has run a safe-house in Kuwait that served as [
sic
] key transit point between Bahrain and Lebanon, has engaged in weapons smuggling, and may still be involved in terrorist-related activities.” According to Bahraini officials, around thirty-seven other known Bahraini Hezbollah members likely fled to Iran or Lebanon. The possible ties to Iran and the new name led CIA analysts to suggest that “Tehran may be working to create a new Hezbollah cell to oppose the Bahraini Government.” The contact maintained between these radical Bahraini Shi’a and Lebanese Hezbollah suggested to the CIA “that Bahraini Hizballah retains an infrastructure in Bahrain as well.” Underscoring this hypothesis was the fact that the individuals arrested in Kuwait were also raising money to send back to Bahrain.
¹⁶