The assassination of Hizbollah’s terror mastermind, Imad Moughniyeh, in Damascus on Tuesday night is certainly a very welcome blow against Islamist terrorism, and a salutory reminder to terrorist organisations everywhere that even their most valued leaders can and will be hunted down, no matter how well they disguise and protect themselves.
Killing Moughniyeh -- at least assuming that the operation was carried out by the Mossad or CIA and not, as some analysts have already mooted, the Syrians themselves in order to curry favour with Washington -- will certainly hurt the morale of Hizbollah and some of its allies, and will force them to divert attention and resources to investigating the failure of their internal security, at least initially at the expense of carrying out attacks on Western interests.
However, anyone expecting that this killing will make a significant difference to the level of terrorist activity will be disappointed. In the greater scheme of things, Moughniyeh was basically a long-time terrorism celebrity who won his infamy by planning many of the more prominent attacks of the past against US, Israeli and Jewish targets: the US embassy and Marine Corps HQ in Beirut during the 1980s, the Israeli embassy and Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires during the 1990s, and so on. He has certainly played a major role recently in motivating and training Iranian terrorists and their mainly Shiite allies in Iraq and Lebanon. However, the Middle East itself is no longer the central front of Islamic terror, and Moughniyeh’s influence on terrorist activity, both during his life and in the manner of his sudden and well-deserved death, is significantly less in today’s main operational fronts: the USA, Britain, France, Sudan, Somalia, Australia and the Philippines. In all these places, Islamic terror is basically a local phenomenon, based on locally born or educated but radicalised Muslims who form terror cells more or less spontaneously: for them, Moughniyeh is now just another shahid, but his death certainly won’t deter them from their goals.
This change of organisational culture in the terrorist world, from the organisations with clearly identifiable leaders (Arafat, Habash, Hawatmeh et al) that dominated Palestinian terrorism to the newer phenomenon of loosely allied groups formed around the brand name of Al Qa’eda, is of huge importance in understanding correctly how to fight them. Moughniyeh’s demise will certainly cause Hizbollah a lot of dislocation, fear and possibly scapegoating too, and will probably lead to revenge attacks against US and Israeli targets worldwide; but in the longer term, his disappearance will weaken the Iran-Lebanon axis of Shite terrorism, because Moughniyeh was a key figure in coordinating, planning and executing terror operations. The small indigenous cells of American, British or German Muslims -- or even the larger and better organised group that carried out the 9/11 attacks -- that have contemplated, planned and sometimes succeeded in carrying out terror outrages do not depend to anything like the same extent on brilliant or charismatic leaders of Moughniyeh’s kind. Even if Usama bin Laden is captured or killed in action, the Al Qa’eda phenomenon is not at all likely to disappear with him, because the cells that form Al Qa’eda today are more or less autonomous, except in their ideological orientation. And few of these cells have identifiable leaders who can even be arrested, let alone assassinated pour encourager les autres, even if the Western governments could contemplate such action.
This distinction is especially important in the context of counter-terrorism financing. Moughniyeh’s operational leadership of Hizbollah was supported not only by Iranian money but also by a large and well-oiled financial machine within Lebanon that included not only profits from narcotics smuggling from Lebanon but also the many legitimate businesses owned by Hizbollah and its sympathisers, from building contractors to a part of Middle East Airlines. On the one hand, much of this was visible, but on the other, Hizbollah’s other identity (in the Jekyll-and-Hyde sense) as a legitimate political party made it almost impossible to ban or interdict its financing. This means that Hizbollah is relatively immune to counter-terrorism financing.
By contrast, the indigenous cells of aspiring terrorists that make up most of Al Qa’eda’s operational strength in target countries depend for their financing, at least for operations and much of their training, on local financial resources: these may come from fund-raising within the local Muslim communities (usually camouflaged under the pretext of raising money for charities in Pakistan, Palestine and so on), or from financial fraud and other crime (credit card and mortgage fraud are especially popular). All of these activities are prone to effective counter-terrorism financing measures, especially front-line intelligence gathering by alert financial institutions coupled with police and intelligence services that know how to piece the jigsaw puzzles together. I am aware that I may appear to be contradicting what I wrote in another piece here less than two weeks ago, ’Sometimes, looking for the money trail is missing the point,’ in which I commented that very often, the amounts of money involved in carrying out a terror outrage are too small to be detected by the normal requirements for banks to file Suspicious Activity Reports. But in fact the bulk of the money raised by these local cells goes for recruitment, training and support activities before any operation is actually carried out, so there is usually enough suspicious financial activity to be detected by the financial institutions and then investigated. And, as I hope to explain very soon in another article here, it turns out that, with all its severe limitations, the compliance regime for anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing does actually produce some real successes.
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