Funding of Hezbollah
Western sources maintain that Hezbollah receives most of its financial, training, weapons, explosives, political, diplomatic, and organizational aid from Iran and Syria.
[11][12] Hezbollah has relied also on funding from the Shi'ite Lebanese Diaspora in West Africa, the United States and, most importantly, the Triple Frontier, or tri-border area, along the junction of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.
For example, Matthew Levitt told a committee of the US Senate that Hezbollah engages in a "wide variety of criminal enterprises" worldwide in order to raise funds.
In a statement in 2011, the party said "The United States' allegations that Hezbollah is funding its activities illegitimately is merely another attempt to tarnish the image of the resistance in Lebanon ... after the failure and exposure of U.S. intelligence operations in our country".
[34] In a 2012 speech, Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah said "Time and again they speak about the drug networks in Latin America and Europe and they say Hezbollah is financing these activities.
[36] In the Golden Triangle region of South-East Asia, Hezbollah generates funding with the heroin trade and reportedly the smuggling of rare or precious items or materials.
[37] Mohammed Raad, at one time leader of Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc, said money from Iran came only through private charities to be used for health care, education and the support of war widows.
[44] In September 2020, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned two Lebanese ministers Ali Hassan Khalil and Yusuf Finyanus, due to their "material support to Hezbollah" and other corruption charges.
[46] On January 9, 2010, Der Spiegel reported that drug dealers, on behalf of Hezbollah, transfer millions to Lebanese groups via European narcotics transactions.
[50] On October 21, 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported that an international cocaine smuggling and money laundering ring with alleged connections to Hezbollah was dismantled in Colombia.
[51] A separate report claimed that the joint operations between the United States and Colombia resulted in the arrest of nearly 130 individuals suspected of being members of a cell formed from an alliance among a famous Colombian drug syndicate known as "North Valley", an armed leftist militant organisation composed by former and current members of FARC, and a group of smugglers of Lebanese origin.
[52] A June 25, 2009 article published by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think tank, reported on the allegations connecting Hezbollah to drug trafficking and money laundering incidents in Curaçao in April 2009 and previous incidents linking Hezbollah to cocaine and money laundering rings dismantled in Colombia and 2008 and a similar ring dismantled in June 2005.
A further check of court records indicated that Kourani told the FBI his brother is the group's (Hezbollah) chief of military security in southern Lebanon.
The SFS states that the Venezuelan government has been instrumental in providing documents to "Iran and other extremists seeking to enter North America without being detected.
[58][59] One of the key figures of the Venezuelan government noted in the SFS report was the Lebanese born former Minister of the Interior, Tarek El Aissami, who allegedly "developed a sophisticated financial network and multi-level networks as a criminal-terrorist pipeline to bring Islamic militants to Venezuela and neighboring countries, and to send illicit funds from Latin America to the Middle East".
[63] Mohammed Hammoud was convicted in the United States for "violating a ban on material support of groups designated as terrorist organizations".
[65] Mahmoud Ali Suleiman, the Hezbollah operative captured in August 2006 by the IDF for his role in the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12, admitted during his interrogation that he received weapons-training and religious instruction in Iran.
On August 4, 2006, Jane's Defence Weekly, a defense industry magazine, reported that Hezbollah asked Iran for "a constant supply of weapons to support its operations against Israel" in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.
The report cited Western diplomatic sources as saying that Iranian authorities promised Hezbollah a steady supply of weapons "for the next stage of the confrontation".
[75][76] In a 2016 speech, Nasrallah publicly announced for the first time that all of his organization’s funding comes directly from Iran, “The budget of Hizbullah, its salaries, its expenses, its food, its drink, its weapons, and its missiles come from the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Nasrallah added that the funding is directly transferred to the group, not through banks and other financial institutions, “As long as Iran has money, we have money… Just as we receive the rockets that we use to threaten Israel, we are receiving our money.” [77] As of 2018, annual Iranian monetary support for Hezbollah is estimated at 700 million dollars according to US estimates.
