This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Joe Adam George, December 2, 2024
A 60-day ceasefire deal between Israel and the Shiite Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah is now in force after months of a full-scale war between the two sworn enemies. However, it would be delusional to think that this deal will keep the Jewish state safe from an army of genocidal jihadists whose hybrid-guerilla warfare methods inspired fellow Iran proxy, Hamas, to carry out the October 7 massacre. If anything, this temporary truce offers Hezbollah much-needed respite from the pummeling it has received at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) since September.
The war has severely depleted the coffers of Hezbollah, one of the world’s richest terrorist groups. In addition to seizing hundreds of millions of dollars of the group’s ill-gotten wealth, Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah’s de facto financial network, al-Qard al-Hassan, in Lebanon has further eroded the group’s capability to finance its insurgency efforts.
These financial setbacks have forced Hezbollah — the “Party of God” — to recuperate its losses by quickly boosting sales of illicit drugs. As a major money laundering hub for the group’s narco-terrorism business, Canada is on Hezbollah’s radar.
Following its inception during the Lebanese Civil War, Hezbollah has leveraged its worldwide networks of supporters and transnational criminal gangs to finance its decades-long terrorism campaign against Israel and to expand its influence among Sunni-majority Arab states. Hezbollah earns at least 30 per cent of its annual revenue of over US$1 billion (C$1.4 billion) through crime. However, given the group’s significant involvement in criminal activities across six continents, that figure is likely conservative. The combined value of the global narco-trafficking and trade-based money laundering markets is estimated to be well over US$1.5 trillion annually.
Since the 2000s, Hezbollah has washed vast sums of cocaine and fentanyl cash in Canada along with Chinese triads, Middle Eastern organized crime groups and Latin American drug cartels. Last month’s drug bust in B.C. — the biggest in Canadian history — saw the seizure of enough fentanyl to kill 95 million people, in addition to copious amounts of other illicit drugs. That the total profit from the seized drugs would have been an estimated C$485 million indicates the high degree of sophistication and transnational reach of these ventures, which include Hezbollah’s narco-terrorism empire.
The seizure of 390 kilograms of methamphetamine at the same drug bust confirms that Canada is now a “source country” for meth, as police have previously characterized it. A potent synthetic stimulant, meth is closely associated with Captagon, Hezbollah’s drug of choice. Nicknamed “the drug of jihad” or “poor man’s cocaine,” Hezbollah uses Captagon as a powerful stimulant to keep its fighters alert during battles whilst selling it to partygoers in Gulf states to generate profits to fund terrorism.
In a highly concerning development, the United States has warned that Iran is developing powerful chemical weapons using synthetic opioids like fentanyl to supply its proxies, including Hezbollah, for potential use in conflicts to incapacitate and even kill soldiers and civilians. The discovery of gas masks, chemical materials and sedatives in the possession of Hezbollah operatives by the IDF suggests the high probability of this threat becoming a reality.
Having been covertly active in Canada since the 1990s, Hezbollah also capitalizes on the significant sympathy it enjoys among Canadian Muslims, particularly the Lebanese Shia diaspora. As last year’s trial of Cameron Ortis, a former RCMP intelligence director, revealed, Hezbollah’s local networks and criminal associates are known to generate billions in funds and provide material support through illicit means such as car theft, gun smuggling, racketeering, money laundering, immigration fraud and insurance scams.
Although Hezbollah primarily uses its coffers to maintain its military operations against Israel, the funds also pose considerable short- and long-term threats in Canada.
Pro-Palestinian student protests across the West appear to have impressed Hezbollah, prompting one terror group official to announce his intent to exploit these students to “enter the heart of western societies.” The unprecedented support for the Palestinian cause would incline the group’s Canada-based sympathizers to covertly finance and propagate youth radicalization to continue subverting Canadian laws and institutions.
Hezbollah maintains “sleeper cells” across the world, including Canada, which it can activate to target Israeli and western interests to avenge the killing of its leaders, as it has attempted to do in the past.
For decades, Hezbollah and its sympathizers have taken advantage of Canada’s freedoms and systems to fuel the perpetual cycle of violence and death in the Middle East. Canada must not be complicit in funding global terrorism, especially at the expense of vulnerable Canadians, many of whom have lost their lives to the very same illicit drugs produced to fund Hezbollah.
The flow of narcotics into the U.S. is also of serious concern for President-elect Donald Trump and he made that explicitly clear in his threat to impose tariffs of 25 per cent on Canadian goods. Hence, it would be in the Trudeau government’s best interests not to find itself in a diplomatic jam when the Trump administration starts to crack down on the drug menace.
As Hezbollah resorts to narco-terrorism to finance fresh attacks against Israel, it is incumbent upon Canada to stem the flow of dirty money, treat collaborators as terrorists, seize the assets that resource terror and reassert the sanctity of Canada’s financial corporations and systems.
Joe Adam George is a national security analyst with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Canada research lead on Islamist extremism with the Middle East Forum, a U.S. policy think-tank.
