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Steven Emerson,
Executive Director
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February 10, 2017
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ISIS
Terrorists Tapping Organized Crime to Infiltrate Europe
by IPT News • Feb 10, 2017 at
3:05 pm
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With the help of organized criminal elements, Islamic State terrorists
reportedly are buying legitimate British passports that can evade security
detection from security authorities, the Daily Beast reports.
An Italian intelligence investigation into the Camorra mafia discovered
an advertisement on the deep web that linked to a Naples firm capable of
producing sophisticated biometric passports.
"We are selling original UK Passports made with your info/picture.
Also, your info will get entered into the official passport database,"
the advertisement reads. "So its (sic) possible to travel with our
passports. How do we do it? Trade secret! Information on how to send us
your info and picture will be given after purchase! You can even enter the
UK/EU with our passports, we can just add a stamp for the country you are
in."
Other investigations also shed light onto the broader ties between
terrorists and European criminal organizations, including in the smuggling
of weapons and forged documents.
Last year Italian authorities arrested an Iraqi man in Naples for facilitating
weapons and document transfers to the Islamic State.
"Naples has been, for many years, a central logistics base for the
Middle East," prosecutor Franco Roberti told the Daily Beast last year,
adding that "the Camorra (mafia) is also active in the world of
jihadist terrorism that passes through Naples."
Terrorists are diversifying their funding sources through various
criminal means to underwrite their violent and nefarious activities. The
criminal-terrorism nexus manifests itself in several ways: mainly in the
form of cooperation between terrorist groups and organized criminal
elements, and crimes by terrorists which are conducted to finance their own
operations. Terrorists' reliance in counterfeiting in particular has
attracted more attention recently with the rise of Islamic State networks
in Europe and other parts of the world.
Lacking a formal state sponsor, and facing setbacks in Syria and Iraq,
the Islamic State may start to depend more on criminal relationships to
fuel their operations and to infiltrate terrorists into Western for the
purposes of carrying out attacks abroad.
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