Hezbollah's criminal activities range from drug trafficking in cocaine and heroin, to cigarette smuggling, document and identity card forgery, and money laundering through Iran's and Lebanon's banking systems. 

These criminal enterprises fill its coffers, facilitate its domination of Lebanon's political system, and underpin the buildup of the organization's global terrorist and intelligence infrastructure. 

This is so much the case that, in October 2018, U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions designated Hezbollah as one of the world's leading transnational criminal organizations alongside four Latin American drug cartels.[1]

A Complex Criminal Web

Hezbollah's international criminal activity dates back to the 1980s when the newly-established organization began laundering money for drug cartels through Lebanese immigrants in Latin America. 

Since then, it has become one of the world's largest drug suppliers and money laundering organizations, working in close cooperation with a string of Latin American paramilitary and criminal organizations, including Colombia's Medellin cartel, La Oficina de Envigado, North Valley cartel, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (People's Army, FARC), as well as Brazil's First Command of the Capital (PCC) and the Mexican Los Zetas.

Hezbollah's criminal network operates relatively independently from the organization's political and military wings, which are closely aligned with Tehran. The network is strategically managed and led by a chain of senior officials but maintains an intricate system of buffers to avoid linking the organization to criminal activity. 

Hezbollah operatives carry out robberies around the world and send the proceeds to Iran from where they are subsequently transferred to the organization's Lebanese bank accounts. Profits from drug deals of Latin American cartels in Europe and the United States are also sent to Hezbollah, which deducts a commission before laundering the rest of the money and returning it to the drug cartels. According to the U.S Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), this laundering activity is done through the purchase and sale of luxury cars, as well as by other means.

The significance of Hezbollah's transnational criminal activities cannot be overstated. While the lion's share of the organization's funding still comes from Tehran, its steadily growing criminal network boosts its maneuverability vis-à-vis its patron and its political leverage in the Lebanese political scene. It is regrettable, therefore, that the EU and some U.S. administrations have turned a blind eye to Hezbollah's criminal activities—the Obama administration even obstructed Project Cassandra in its eagerness to lure Tehran into a nuclear deal

No less importantly, the EU should drop the artificial distinction between Hezbollah's "political" and "military" wings—which the organization itself rejects. Washington, too, must ramp up designating and sanctioning activists, associates, companies, and groups related to Hezbollah and Iran. Without undercutting Hezbollah's crime syndicate, the fight against its global terrorist activities is doomed to failure.

Omer Dostri is a research associate at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) specializing in military strategy and national security.