by leetch

Terrorism, one of the harshest challenges that the 21st century has yet faced, has its roots attached to the money trail from where the outlaws draw their oxygen. Tracking down and stopping the cash flows is proving harder than hunting down the terrorists.

From trading in contrabands, drug trafficking, skimming charity money, money laundering (Hawala) from tax havens, manipulation of stock markets, investments in real estate, oil money, extortion to even reports of poaching and selling of rare animals parts in the international markets for funding terrorism have been reported from around the globe.

When plastic money and cashless transactions are overtaking currency transactions and where accounts can be maintained and operated through mobile phones and laptop computers from any global location, the end use of the money transferred is hard to determine.

Since the attack on the World Trade Towers in September 2001, global banking norms have been tightened, still terrorism continues to draw on advanced technologies and proliferation of death squads has only multiplied.

Liberation of Tamil Tigers also known as LTTE, the deadly terrorist outfit seeking a separate homeland of Tamils in Sri Lanka, have even acquired airplanes. Air capability of the terrorist outfit is giving the security forces of the island country, sleepless nights. Just how have they managed to finance and procure these planes is indicative enough that tracking the money trail is proving harder than ever before.

Investigating the money trail of organizations like Al Qaeda that have a wider global imprint is even more difficult. The world does hear of chilling intelligence reports about the Al-Qaeda on the look out to buy nuclear weapons from former Soviet Union states or about pursuing clandestine biological weapon programs.

Surely religious zeal is not enough to keep Al-Qaeda afloat in the business, just how is the money reaching them and how is it being dispersed to recruit, train and equip cadres is where the intelligence agencies are having least success.

To get even with opponents, even governments have and do organize and fund terrorism.

The very same Al-Qaeda and Taliban, which the American and NATO forces are battling in hostile Afghanistan, were armed, trained and funded by US tax payers money to fight the Soviet occupation in the 1990’s. Now again, reports have surfaced that US tax payers money is being used to finance Al Qaeda terrorist activity against an assertive Shities ethnicity in Iraq.

Iraq has become the laboratory where various streams of terrorism are being experimented. State terrorism, ethnic terrorism, religious terrorism, financial terrorism are all mingled to find a justifiable solution to a war gone wrong.

Transactions of the drug cartels of South America, which often finds a route to terrorist outfits, passes through financial agencies with very strict norms but is hardly ever intercepted. Opium trade of Afghanistan sustains terrorism, but the contraband does reach the streets of New York and is paid for by money transacted through legal institutions or alternate ones.

The money trail of the infamous Khan Laboratories that caused the world’s largest nuclear proliferation has not been made public yet. Was the disgraced Khan, the only culprit in the deal or were there other military and government functionaries’ part of the racket that made millions of dollars in trading secret nuclear weapon programs!

One nation’s terrorist is considered another nations freedom fighter. Jihad finds martyrdom on one soil and is branded as terrorism on another. In such a scenario, to demarcate which money is used to contain terrorism and which is used to achieve aspiring nationalism, gets lost in a maze of conflicting objectives.