Al Qaeda Nostra

By Cernig

Newsweek has a very interesting look at AQI's transition from a terror group to a long-term organised crime outfit.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is no stranger to racketeering. The group has long raised money through activities like ransoming kidnapping victims, car theft, commandeering rations, counterfeiting and hijacking fuel trucks. In some cases members dressed as police will set up a fake checkpoint, seize late-model cars and either kill or chase off the drivers. They'll then change the license plates and transport the vehicles to be sold in another city�often Kirkuk or Baghdad. (One Baqubah man happened on his stolen car in Khana'an, tricked out with new plates. The driver admitted he'd bought it from a man he knew to be AQI. "But when the original owner demanded his vehicle back, the new owner told him, 'If you have a problem, go talk to the Islamic State of Iraq [another name for AQI]'," says Lt. Col. Ziad Tarik Noman, who sees many detainees at Khamees, an Iraqi military base near Baqubah.) AQI sells stolen vehicles through a network of fences. The group's spies also finger wealthy people and tell Al Qaeda leaders about businesses they own and what kind of ransoms they could pay, along with details of their movements. At Khamees, Iraqi Army commanders monitor the criminal work of the terrorists, who even shake down Iraqi Army soldiers for ammunition, says 5th Division Lt. Col. Wa'el Abdullah.

The haul from these illegal enterprises runs to the tens of millions of dollars, but the single most lucrative activity comes from oil rackets centered on Bayji, says an Iraqi government official who does not want to be named discussing specifics. There the insurgents puncture holes in pipelines, siphon oil into trucks and sell it on the black market, a phenomenon called "illegal oil bunkering," says Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad. This activity nets AQI an estimated $2 million a month. The group also sets up quasi-legitimate gas stations and fuel-trucking companies, demands "protection" payments from legitimate businesses and hijacks trucks carrying gasoline and kerosene, then resells the fuel. AQI can prey almost at will on Iraq's oil apparatus, because the government has no way to safeguard the country's more than 4,000 miles of pipelines. "What I see more and more is a Mafia-esque criminal gang," Lt. Col. Patrick Mackin, a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Diyala province, says of AQI's activities.

This isn't surprising - most terrorist outfits have financed their violent activities by crime - when you're already murdering outlkaws a little smuggling or extrortion pales by comparison. But it should indicate that Al Qaeda in Iraq won't be finished even if its primary expression - terrorism - is ever ended. The survivors will continue to believe as they always have and simply make it the guiding ethos of their new mafia-like organisation. In turn, they will do deals with new terrorists to finance violence through criminal entrepreneurship. And so it goes on into a new cycle - unless someone can break the cycle.

Historically, it seems to me, every terrorist group that has survived long enough has made the transition either to government or to organised criminal enterprise - which many would say are the same thing under different labels.