Terrorism and crime have always been closely linked and the dividing line between them blurred. For terrorist groups, criminality can be an end in itself. If the aim is the overthrow of the capitalist system, robbing banks and extorting money from the business community serves the purpose of inflicting damage on that system whilst simultaneously generating funds that can finance other terrorist activities. In tsarist Russia, anarchist and communist groups both engaged in criminality, as did the Montoneros and Tupamaros in Latin America, the Japanese Red Army in Japan, and the Red Brigades and Red Army Faction in Europe throughout the 1970s.
Criminality has also become a major enabler of the jihadi terrorist threat now facing the world. This is particularly true in the developing world where the overwhelming majority of such terrorism actually occurs. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has derived significant revenue from taxing the drugs trade. In Pakistan’s tribal areas, al-Qaeda and related groups such as the Haqqani network have been able to derive revenue from their control of traditional smuggling routes. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda affiliates have thrived in areas with weak governments, such as the Sinai Peninsula, the Sahel, Northern Nigeria, and Somalia.
In the developed world, on the other hand, what used to be referred to in Northern Ireland as “ordinary decent criminals” have tended to be wary of involvement with terrorist groups. In most cases, organized criminal networks have aspired to operate below the line that, by crossing, would expose them to sustained and focused state attention.
Broadly speaking, these distinctions between developed and developing countries and their crime and terror networks still apply. But in an increasingly globalized world, the differences begin to blur. And in a world where terrorism is increasingly transnational in nature, distinctions between terrorism and criminality are also becoming more blurred.
The case of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) exemplifies the nature of this problem. It has been suggested that ISIS has sought to use the refugee flow from Syria to infiltrate numerous operatives into Europe. There is, in fact, little evidence to support this contention. Most of the ISIS terrorists who have been active in Europe are second or even third generation European nationals, and it is individuals from this group that pose the greatest threat to European security.
But it is undoubtedly true that a number of the ISIS operatives who undertook the November 2015 Paris attacks did use the people-smuggling networks operated by criminal groups to travel back from Syria to their home countries, because they knew they themselves were on watch-lists. They often used a variety of forged documentation also provided by criminal groups. Such document factories exist in many European countries and will provide high-quality forged or stolen identity papers to anyone who can pay. Similarly, the weapons used in the Paris attacks appear to be have been smuggled to Belgium by criminals based in former Yugoslavia, where they are in abundant supply. An even closer nexus between terrorism and criminality arises out of the discovery that the Italian Mafia has been obliged to establish links with ISIS in Libya, in order to be able to smuggle cannabis out of North Africa.
And although it is impossible to generalize, there are many cases where European jihadists have graduated to terrorism from criminality, often of the petty variety. This is particularly the case in some of the immigrant ghettoes established in parts of Western Europe, the Brussels district of Molenbeek being a case in point. Young men from immigrant communities with few prospects and uncertain of their identities find various forms of criminality, including selling drugs, as both a way of earning money and acquiring a sense of self-esteem and social status. This breeds a sense of alienation from and contempt for main-stream society. In such an environment, joining a jihadist group arguably becomes just another way of asserting an already strong anti-establishment identity and appears to have little to do with religious observance or ideological conviction. Indeed, many of those involved in the Paris attacks led an ostentatiously secular lifestyle, involving alcohol and drugs, which made their apparent radicalization seem all the more shocking.
What is of growing concern is neither the fact of such criminality nor the existence of immigrant ghettoes per se. Such phenomena have always existed to a degree. Of greater concern is the potential for criminal groups within that environment to pose a direct challenge to the state in a way similar to what is observed in the favelas of Brazil. Some of the immigrant ghettoes around Paris’s periphery – the banlieus – are already effectively no-go areas, where the police can only enter armed and in numbers. In Marseilles, a city always strongly associated with criminality, gang violence has now begun to have an impact on the daily lives of citizens, with even primary schools finding themselves caught up in the crossfire of gang warfare.
A culture that encourages lawlessness and contempt for established social norms risks creating a breeding-ground for violent extremism in the same way that has happened in marginalized regions of the developing world with young men and women being drawn to jihadism because they feel they have nothing to lose. And in a globalized hyper-connected world, where awareness of what is happening elsewhere is pervasive and instantaneous, it is not hard to imagine how what is happening in other regions of the world afflicted by violent extremism can serve to stimulate even more violent and unconstrained behavior in developed countries.
Dealing with this kind of situation presents a real challenge to governments. The temptation to allow marginalized communities to police themselves and hope their problems will somehow not migrate to the rest of society is understandable but a recipe for failure. What is needed is an approach that combines active engagement with marginalized communities combined with a willingness and ability to act firmly and decisively when state authority is challenged. Good intelligence, and in particular human intelligence, will be a key ingredient of success; though achieving effective penetration of tightly-knit and suspicious communities will not prove easy. The focus cannot just be on suspect terrorists but must also be on the criminal networks that increasingly enable such activity. Until now, it has been difficult for western policy makers to persuade themselves that organized criminality rises to the level at which it becomes a strategic threat. But with a growing nexus between criminality and terrorism, a better understanding of this nexus and an ability to deal with it is critical.
