Taliban now richer than Al Qaida
Yesterday the Assistant Secretary for (against) Terrorist Financing David S. Cohen addressed the ABA Money Laundering Enforcement Conference. Mr Cohen emphasized the importance of the private sector in combating money laundering and terrorism financing. It is mainly the banking sector that actually enforces the filtering of financial transactions against all sorts of lists of unwanted organizations and individuals. This actually resulted in choking off a certain money flow to Al Qaeda. Although we are far from a victory, Mr Cohen noted:
Al Qaida’s current financial predicament represents one good measure of the success of these coordinated strategies. In the first six months of this year, al Qaida’s leaders made four public appeals for money, including one in June of this year, when an al Qaida leader announced that a lack of funding was hurting the group’s recruitment and training. We assess that al Qaida is in its weakest financial condition in several years, and that, as a result, its influence is waning.
Three issues are in the path to ultimate victory. First of all, there is still a pool of donors to be dealt with.
But we have not yet dissuaded nearly enough donors from wanting to give in the first place. To do so will require increased assistance from our partners in the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia and elsewhere, in working with us in a sustained effort to counter radicalization.
Secondly, other terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are in a stronger financial position and pose a serious threat. Lastly, terrorist organizations more and more turn to conventional crime to fund their efforts.
Due, in part, to the success we have had in disrupting their traditional funding sources, terrorist organizations’ reliance on crime to finance their operations appears to be expanding. To be sure, this shift has presented some new and difficult challenges, but it also has created new opportunities that we – working together – can exploit. Simply put, to the extent that terrorist organizations increasingly turn to traditional criminal conduct to finance their activities, their funding networks become increasingly vulnerable to detection by well-designed, well-implemented, and well-funded AML/CFT programs…
We also know that historically some al Qaida cells have financed their activities through street crime, such as robberies and burglary, drug trafficking and bank fraud. In 2007, for example, British authorities arrested a 22-year-old man and accused him of supporting al Qaida in Iraq through a credit card fraud scheme, in which he had allegedly sold stolen credit card numbers online and purchased goods for fighters with the proceeds…
But the increasing use of financial crime by terrorist organizations to fund their activities places financial institutions in a much stronger position to detect terrorist financing, and to provide valuable information to the government to help us disrupt financing networks…
Mr Cohen recognized that the funding of terrorism is hard to detect just by reviewing money flows. But the success that the private sector has with identifying ‘conventional’ crime proceeds will actually increase the changes for law enforcement to identify terrorism financing now these two are increasingly aligned…. If law enforcement can find the link between the ‘conventional crime proceeds’ and terrorists…
Somehow it seems strange that the government would place the ball in the private sector’s court; now we have told you terrorists are using conventional criminal acts to fund terrorism, you are in a perfect place to help us catch them. Nothing actually changes but perhaps a new sense of urgency to report ‘conventional crime money laundering’.
We strongly believe in close cooperation between private and public sector to protects our nations against terrorism and the impact of organized crime. True public private partnerships will help this effort by allowing a flow of information (with the necessary restrictions of course) both ways to target terrorism financing. In some countries these types of ppp’s have been quite successful. Let’s make these ppp’s that currently exist a success so we can increasingly cooperate to stop the largest chunk of terrorist funding.
