WASHINGTON–A recent House Homeland Security subcommittee shed light on the fact that Hezbollah, a 30-year-old Islamic militant group with ties to Iran, is functioning in Latin America as a military trainer and criminal moneymaker.
Roger Noriega, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former top State Department official, testified before the committee that he expects to “see the Hezbollah presence in Latin America become more active and deadly in the coming years.”
Douglas Farah of the International Assessment and Strategy Center said Hezbollah is a threat to global security.
“Hezbollah’s presence in Latin America is growing, and the organization remains the premiere terrorist organization in the world,” Farah said at the July 7 hearing in front of Congress.
The U.S., Canada, Israel and the Netherlands consider Hezbollah to be a full-fledged terrorist group. A handful of other countries have reservations about that title, but consider Hezbollah a threat.
Melani Cammett, a political scientist at Brown University who attended the hearing, said although Hezbollah is militant in nature the group does not appear to be plotting against the U.S.
She noted that the Shiite militant group has not targeted the U.S. with violence since the 1980s.
But Janice Kephart from the Center for Immigration Studies and a member of the 9/11 Commission said Hezbollah is a threat to U.S national security and that allegedly hundreds of members have crossed into U.S through the Tijuana. She’s been focusing most of her research as of late on Hezbollah’s growing American presence, specifically the group’s influence in Mexico on drug cartels.
“There’s nothing that shows Hezbollah has an interest in just being a political organization. They clearly still want to retain a terrorist status,” Kephart said.
She’s convinced that Hezbollah uses Mexican drug cartels to do their dirty work – not unlike the way the Mafia would employ hit men in its glory days.
“What we’re seeing is an organization that is extremely good at using other organizations as a proxy,” Kephart said.
In addition to the billions of dollars Hezbollah makes through illegal sales –including black market baby formula in southern California and methamphetamines and cigarettes in Canada – Kephart now believes Hezbollah played a role in plotting 9/11.
“They did attack us, they just used a proxy,” Kephart said.
She said Hezbollah members trained Al Qaeda suicide bombers who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
“If the training and support had not happened, Al Qaeda could not have pulled that off.”
She’s not alone. The group Iran 911 Case is comprised of lawyers who argue for Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. In a Manhattan federal court in May 2011, lawyers filed documentation on behalf of families of 9/11 victims that it claims shows Iran was influential in coordinating the September 11 attacks. It wants further U.S. investigation; other counterterrorism experts have said such involvement by Iran may only have amounted to a few people helping some of the plotters with logistics.
Imad Mugniyah, a Lebanese Shiite assassinated in Syria in 2008, is believed to have been the middleman between al-Qaida and Iran. Mugniyah was high up in Hezbollah. And Iran gave money to Hezbollah who in turn trained suicide bombers.
Foreign policy consultant and writer James Bosworth, who lives in Managua, Nicaragua, thinks the Hezbollah terrorist concern in the Americas is blown out of proportion. They are doing criminal things but they are not an imminent threat.
“There’s a real security emergency in Latin America – it is the region with the highest level of violent crime in the world,” Bosworth said in a phone interview. “And none of that has to do with Hezbollah.”
He wrote an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor arguing that by focusing on Hezbollah, the U.S. is ignoring more pressing concerns in Latin America.
The jury is hung on how much the U.S. should focus counterterrorism efforts on Hezbollah. Worth noting: the White House National Strategy for Counterterrorism, released this June, does not address terrorist networks in Latin America.
But one thing is pretty clear: Hezbollah is not going away anytime soon.
Hezbollah originated in 1982 in Lebanon during that country’s civil war. Since then, they’ve been accused of several terrorist attacks: a 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed more than 200 Marines; a TWA flight hijacking in 1985; two attacks on Jews in Argentina in the early 1990s that killed more than 100 people; a 2006 capturing of two Israeli soldiers.
Since 2006, Hezbollah has not claimed responsibility for any major international attacks, but the U.S. estimates there are several thousand Hezbollah militants worldwide and the group has tens of thousands of short and long-range rockets, according to ForeignAffairs.com.
Iran, which gives more than $100 million annually to Hezbollah, cut a significant amount of its yearly funding of the militant group.
Kephart doesn’t know how to interpret that funding cut. Does it mean that Hezbollah is becoming more self-sufficient or is there a rift between Iran and its once-trusted military partner?
“I see Hezbollah potentially splintering from Iran,” Kephart said.
In recent years, Hezbollah also has become a powerful political force.
As of June, Hezbollah controlled a majority of Lebanon’s cabinet. They are the political majority in that country and control schools, services and mosques in Lebanon.
