Terrorism, Drug Trafficking, and ISIS: When Wicked Worlds Collide

                        

For all the headlines and fear they generate, ISIS isn’t anything new. We’ve seen this before—and much closer to home, writes Don Winslow, bestselling author of The Cartel.  

In my fifteen years of researching and writing about both drug trafficking and terrorism, in writing books such as The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, I have seen a disturbing trend.

Their worlds are merging.

Terrorism and narcotics have always been connected.

The very word “assassin” comes to us from one of the very first terrorist groups, whose killers acted under the influence of hashish. Anti-colonial insurgent groups from the Boxer Rebellion in China to Filipino insurrectionists and Algerian nationalists have fought under the influence of narcotics. Today’s suicide bombers are often given drugs to tranquilize them so they don’t back out of destroying their own lives and the lives of others.

A far more important connection, however, is economic. Drug trafficking has long been used to finance terrorist operations.

Terrorism requires money—to buy weapons, pay operatives, rent houses, travel, conduct surveillance and plan operations. Drugs are low-hanging fruit—easily acquired and easily marketed to immense profits, all in easily transferred cash.

Drugs are money and because they’re illegal the profits are driven into the shadowlands where terrorism grows and thrives. Terrorists and traffickers can easily connect because they inhabit the same spheres and in many cases share the same enemies: law enforcement and intelligence services. Make no mistake, our drug policies have driven these groups into each other’s bloodstained arms.

It is no coincidence that those areas of the world where opium and cocaine grow best are also troubled and often lawless countries.

Drugs know no ideology; they are equal opportunity killers in the terrorism that they support. Both right and left-wing terrorists have financed their atrocities with the sale of narcotics. In the midst of the Vietnam War, as American forces were battling the Viet Cong, American intelligence was helping heroin traffickers fly their product in order to assure their loyalty against the Communists. In the 1980s, American opposition to the left-wing government in Nicaragua led the Reagan administration to cooperate with Mexican cocaine traffickers to fund the anti-communist Contras, by any definition a terrorist group. In the 1990s, Communist FARC terrorists in Colombia made Mexican cartels pay for cocaine not in cash, but in armaments.

Islamic terrorists, including al Qaeda and ISIS, raise funds from trafficking South Asian heroin. Sources in Lebanon and Syria tell me, for example, that Hezbollah finances itself through, ironically, sales of hashish in Israel.

But this is old news.

A more recent development is even more troubling—a merging of tactics, techniques, and philosophy that increasingly unites the worlds of terrorism and drug trafficking.

Each has borrowed tactics from the other.

Both terrorists and traffickers need to control territory—in the first instance to gain a sanctuary from which to train fighters and plan operations, in the second case, traffickers need to control territory in which the base drugs are grown, imported, and then the border territory from which the drugs are smuggled into the consumer nations.

The control of territory requires control of the local populations, and to accomplish this the Mexican cartels, for example, have adopted classic terrorist tactics, most principally the double-handed approach that combines generosity and public works on the one (open) hand with intimidation, torture and murder on the other hand that is closed into a fist.