The Shiite movement is able to raise funds from the large Lebanese community in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, and relies on an organized crime system based on drug money laundering.
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In Abidjan, the Marcory district began a quiet period of mourning after the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, killed in an Israeli strike on Friday, September 27. In this stronghold of the Lebanese diaspora in Côte d’Ivoire, 5,000 kilometers from Beirut, a few businesses remained closed, as did the large Shiite Al-Mahdi mosque.
“We’re obviously sad to see what’s happening in Lebanon,” Elie, an Ivorian-Lebanese entrepreneur, said prudently. As with the nearly 100,000 Lebanese living in the country – 80% of whom are Shiite Muslims – people grow tense and mum when broaching the subject of Hezbollah.
In this neighborhood, nicknamed “Little Beirut,” no one dares talk about the “Party of God” and its influence. Yet its shadow looms large. Most Lebanese Shiites in Côte d’Ivoire, and more widely in West Africa, contribute indirectly to Hezbollah’s war effort in the Middle East through the “zakat,” an informal taxation.
Alongside these voluntary contributions, an entrepreneur of Maronite Christian origin living in Cameroon detailed a few years ago the existence of an institutionalized racketeering system in which the entire Lebanese diaspora is involved. “If you don’t pay, you’re excluded from all the ceremonies,” he reported on condition of anonymity.
How much money this represents remains unknown due to how vast and opaque the network is. Having become a state within a state in Lebanon, the organization has built up a shadow economy based on a vast money-laundering network linked to drug, diamond, timber and arms trafficking in South America and West Africa while benefiting from the complicity of its diaspora.
Smuggling and drug trafficking
Historically supported and financed by Iran, 30% of Hezbollah’s income comes from its organized crime activities, according to figures from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), an American neoconservative think tank. “Smuggling and money laundering are difficult to estimate but probably exceed $300 million a year,” said Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert Hezbollah with the FDD.
While South America is a source of income through drug trafficking, “West Africa acts as a transit point, where the large Lebanese community, well-established in business circles and influential in political circles, helps with the logistics of money laundering and financial transfers to Lebanon,” noted the expert. Hezbollah’s networks are close to the Colombian and Mexican cartels, whose revenues they launder in Africa.
Its method is not new: “Cocaine was shipped from South America to Africa; sold in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East; the cash was then brought to Beirut and placed in money exchange houses; then, through the Lebanese Canadian Bank, the money was sent to buy used cars from companies in the US; the cars were sent to Africa for resale; much of those profits, according to officials, went to Hezbollah,” investigator Derek Maltz, from the US federal agency responsible for combating drug trafficking and distribution, detailed before the House of Representatives in 2017.
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