As Hamas finds itself cornered by the Israeli army bent on eradicating the terrorist militia’s bases, in a campaign that could last years, the group could opt for an “asymmetric” strategy of creating armed cells among its radicalized sympathizers in the West, supplied and protected by financial networks, Muslim communities and far-left politicians installed in various governments.
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has compared Hamas to the Islamic State (ISIS) whose “caliphate” in northern Iraq was invaded in 2016 by the Iraqi army in a US-backed operation, which managed to greatly reduce the activity of the bloodthirsty group.
“As was the case with ISIS, dislodging Hamas from its position as the de facto government in Gaza is the most effective way to deny the group significant funding and resources,” said Dr. Matthew Levitt, director of the Hamas Program. Counterterrorism and Intelligence from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Worse than ISIS
But ISIS never had the financial, military and diplomatic backing of Iran and Russia, nor the apparent political support that Hamas appears to enjoy in the Arab world and Western countries. The group of Palestinian origin has strengthened ties with Moscow since October 7, sending delegations led by its leader Mousa Abu Marzook to meet with senior Kremlin officials and publicly ask Putin for help. He has also held meetings with Cuban and Venezuelan diplomats in Beirut, according to CIA sources.
Hamas operates a vast financing network that could survive the loss of its Gaza hideout. According to a report by the Association of Certified Financial Crime Experts (CFCS), the group is supplied by a sophisticated and complex network of fraudulent businesses, front companies, charities and NGOs based in Qatar, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Turkey, Algeria. , United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, France, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.
Iran has invested billions of dollars in Hamas and the Hezbollah group, according to intelligence sources. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) allocates between $70 and $100 million annually to Hamas, according to reports from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), presented to the US Congressional Banking Committee.
Some of the money is laundered in covert deals with Russia. OFAC investigated a case in which proceeds from a shipment of Iranian oil, through Russian companies, to the Bashir Al Assad regime in Syria were given to the IRGC for distribution to Hamas and Hezbollah. The operation was managed by the Syrian businessman based in Moscow, Mohamed Alchwiki, sanctioned by the US in 2022.
Economic power
Hamas also handles transactions in crypto currency, difficult to detect by US authorities, for which it may have raised more than $100 million between 2021 and 2023, according to reports from the National Counter Terrorism Center. The Investigations also conclude that “terrorist acquisitions in many cases depend on networks of intermediaries unrelated to the terrorist group.” There is the case of an operation to create cells of sympathizers in an Arab university, in which Hamas sent credit cards to students without any terrorist background or previous association with the group.
Such methods would lend themselves to articulating Hamas cells in North America and Europe where activism in favor of the group, particularly among student formations, takes on alarming dimensions. The FBI’s counterterrorism division says it has uncovered “myriad (endless) criminal activity including credit card fraud, fraudulent documentation, counterfeit products and drug trafficking generating funds for Hamas,” since shutting down the operations of the largest Muslim charity in North America, Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which had raised $13 million for Hamas.
Activism
Among the main protagonists of pro-Hamas demonstrations in the US, organized from schools and universities, are veteran activists from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) group, whose violent protests over the death of George Floyd (with a criminal record and a history of drug addiction) at the hands of a police officer in 2020, caused deaths and billions of dollars of damage in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Washington DC. and other cities.
“The Palestinian attack was a revolution and an attempt to reclaim their freedom…an act of self-defense,” reads a note published on October 9 by BLM and the group Students for Justice in Palestine, organized by leftist professors, such as the one who he characterized the atrocities of October 7 as “bracing news.”
Conservative commentators compare the activism of student groups with the so-called Rapid Response Brigades in Cuba and their acts of repudiation or the Youth Militias of the Chinese cultural revolution. Days ago, the police had to go to a school in New York to rescue a teacher who was about to be lynched for speaking out in favor of Israel.
Worst in Europe
The situation in Europe is even more tense due to the growing Muslim population, the result of unbridled emigration from Africa and the Middle East. “It’s as if we were behind enemy lines,” says an officer from the anti-terrorist unit of the French gendarmerie who lives in a Paris suburb whose population is 80% Muslim. Fearing a repeat of the massive riots carried out by Algerian immigrants that hit France a few months ago; The French government has banned pro-Hamas demonstrations.
But aggressive protests have broken out in many other capitals of the European Union, whose authorities have refused to comply with US requests to ban NGOs linked to Hamas, despite ample evidence from investigations in France, Germany and the United Kingdom that demonstrate great Part of the money raised for humanitarian purposes ends up financing terrorist operations.
Spain
Far-left parties represented in Spain’s newly launched socialist government enthusiastically support Hamas. A MEP from the Podemos group, whose leader, Pablo Iglesias, with known ties to Iran, held the vice presidency in the previous cabinet, circulated a photo on social networks during a recent trip to Gaza, in which he appears in a Palestinian flag t-shirt among Hamas militiamen brandishing automatic rifles and rocket launchers.
Painfully aware of the critical support given to him by the minority parties to maintain his fragile parliamentary majority – which includes the heir group of the ETA terrorist movement, Bildu – the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, who recently assumed the rotating presidency of The European Union traveled to Israel last month to call for the creation of an “independent Palestinian nation,” while Palestinian rockets fell on Tel Aviv.
Left and terrorism
The marriage between the European extreme left and Palestinian terrorism dates back to the 1970s, when the Venezuelan Marxist, Iych Ramírez Sánchez, alias “Carlos”, captured by Soviet secret services while attending the Patricio Lumumba University in Moscow, set up operations combined between the most violent factions of the Palestinian movement, such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine of Wadi Haddad and the German Red Army Faction (RAF), headed by Ulrike Meinhoff. Joint groups carried out plane hijackings and a series of attacks in Europe whose brutality pales in comparison to the genocidal acts of Hamas committed on October 7 against Israeli civilians.
The “Carlos Network” was dissolved with the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the RAF leaders were discovered in East Germany. Ramírez was captured a few years later by France. Requests for his release have been made by Venezuela, which has become Iran’s “base of operations” in Latin America, according to US Army War College Latin American affairs specialist Dr. Evan Ellis. IRGC officials advise its security forces, according to the Pentagon, and people identified as Hezbollah operatives identified by OFAC have occupied key positions in the government, such as the one who recently served as oil minister, Tarek El Aissami.
Venezuela
Clandestine flights operated by the IRGC have regularly departed from Caracas to various points on the continent “transporting personnel, cash, documentation, communication equipment and weapons for cells in formation among Muslim communities,” according to a former Argentine intelligence officer who coordinated operations. antiterrorists under previous governments and spoke with DIARIO LAS AMERICAS on condition of anonymity. Terrorist attacks against the US could be carried out if the conflict in the Middle East came to a direct confrontation with Iran, according to Dr. Ellis.
The front will be on
The US Customs and Border Protection Service reports that 169 individuals on terrorist watch lists have been intercepted crossing the border with Mexico this year, compared to zero in 2019. Republican congressmen have asked the director of the Department of Homeland Security for explanations. But there also seem to be Hamas sympathizers there. “Fuck Israel… be ready for its collapse because the Palestinians are ready for freedom,” wrote a DHS employee, Nejwa Ali, on her Facebook account days after October 7. Ali has been placed on leave, according to spokespersons for that department.
