LGF reader “mad as hell” points out a thought-provoking article about the Iran-Lebanon connection, by Gal Luft of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security: Hizballahland.

Formed in 1982 by a group of young graduates of Shiite seminaries in Iran, Hizballah took as its main goal the exporting of Iran’s Khomeini revolution to Lebanon. Although its primary aim was to drive Israel out of Lebanon—Israeli forces had invaded the country in 1982 in order to disrupt and destroy Yasir Arafat’s PLO army, which had a death grip on the south—it was not Israel but the U.S. that became the first casualty of the organization and of its weapon of choice, the suicide attack. In 1983, a Hizballah activist killed 63 people at the U.S. embassy in Beirut; another drove a truck bomb into U.S. Marines headquarters, murdering 241 American servicemen.

That was just the beginning; since the 1980’s, Hizballah has gone international. Its cells have been uncovered in Europe, Southeast Asia, and West Africa. In our own hemisphere, the so-called Triple Frontier or tri-border area along the junction of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil has offered a lucrative haven for the drug and arms trafficking, smuggling, counterfeiting, and other illicit activities that now provide a major source of Hizballah’s funding. And then there is North America. Prior to last December, when Ottawa banned Hizballah, Canada was another major base of fundraising, primarily through a car-theft ring. One of Nasrallah’s top men, Ayub Fawzi, who also appeared on the FBI’s list of 22 most wanted terrorists after 9/11, operated from Canada for several years; so did Muhammed Dbouk, head of a clandestine cell in Vancouver that bought military equipment for the organization.

In the U.S. itself, Hizballah activists enjoy, as the FBI has warned, “the capability to attempt terrorist attacks.” One operative, Muhammad Hammoud, led a recently uncovered cigarette-smuggling ring in North Carolina and Michigan. A graduate of Hizballah’s training camps in Lebanon, Hammoud managed to gain entry to the country using forged immigration documents; once here, he married an American woman and established a false identity. His cell purchased and sent it on to Lebanon dual-use equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, while he himself functioned as a “sleeper” terrorist, i.e., one who could easily be activated to help carry out an actual armed attack. Hammoud’s cell was discovered by sheer luck when an off-duty police officer, working as a security guard, noticed suspicious activity at a cigarette wholesaler in North Carolina. How many others like Hammoud are living in the U.S. is impossible to know.