Charles Elias Chartouni:The Syrian Regime, Hezbollah and Pro-Iranian Militias and the Organized Crime-Terrorism Nexus/شارل الياس شرتوني: النظام السوري، حزب الله ، الميليشيات الموالية لإيران والعلاقة بين الجريمة المنظمة والإرهاب

57

شارل الياس شرتوني: النظام السوري، حزب الله ، الميليشيات الموالية لإيران والعلاقة بين الجريمة المنظمة والإرهاب
The Syrian Regime, Hezbollah and Pro-Iranian Militias and the Organized Crime-Terrorism Nexus
Charles Elias Chartouni/December 15/2021

The important NYTimes report (December, 5 2021) on the transformation of Syria into a narco-State (captagon production) in connection with Hezbollah and the drug ring leaders (Nouh Zeaiter and ilk) operating on the interfaces between the two countries(Syria and Lebanon), the active sabotaging of civil peace in both Lebanon and Iraq and politically motivated assassinations in both countries, and the diligent spawning of internecine conflicts all across the Near Eastern geopolitical spectrum are quite challenging. The most striking feature of the Iranian destabilization strategy is its operational configuration structured on a continuum between political terrorism and organized criminality which aptly qualifies rogue states. The active action on political disruption based on the merger between terrorism and organized criminality has been a hallmark of totalitarian movements in the thirties of the Twentieth century Europe (Communism, Nazism, Fascism), the Cold Era whereby the Soviet Union and China enlisted and instrumentalized leftist terror movements (Brigada Rota, Baader -Meinhoff, Japanese Red Army, Palestinian paramilitary groups PFLP, DFLP, Latin American communist guerrilla piloted by Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, Daniel Ortega, Abimael Guzmán …), the Islamist terror movements (al Qaida, ISIS, Islamic Brotherhood splinter groups…) and the terrorist movements piloted by the Iranian regime and entrusted to the various Hezbollah branches and led by its Lebanese headquarters.

What we are witnessing at this time is the revival of the well tested modus operandi of the Cold War era whereby organized criminality (illegal drugs production and circulation, illegal economic activities, money laundering, arm smuggling ….) coalesce with terrorist undertakings, targeted political assassinations, assiduous subversion activities and shifting coalitions aimed at the creation and perpetuation of conflict zones as testified by the composite destabilization strategy scripted and enforced by Hezbollah and its clones, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, the Palestinian camps in Lebanon and Yemen…,. The fusion between terror and organized criminality locates on a continuum, and is a basic given if we were to make sense of the mobile and microcosmic nature of the post Cold War brand of conflicts. The emerging geopolitics of a disintegrating Middle Eastern geopolitical order is made up of ruptures, rhizomatic conflicts and disarrayed political architecture which evinces the structural defects of territorial statehood and its endemic and self defeating inabilities in our region.

The inability of the Syrian regime to regain legitimacy, rebuild State institutions and oversee,reconciliation and reconstruction processes, is paralleled by its transformation into a narco-State run by a a criminal military and sectarian Alawite oligarchy and its domestic minions), backed up by outright Russian tutelage and ambiguous relationships with Iran and its Lebanese Hezbollah piloting group. The criminal-terrorist nexus is the functional equivalent of Syria’s, Lebanon’s and Iraq’s inability to rebuild sustainable State structures based on nomothetic foundations and constitutional exercise of power. The very survival of the self defeating Islamic dystopia in Iran depends on its ability to disrupt, prevent and thwart any attempt at rebuilding embedded State structures based on working relationships with hypothetical, let alone inexistant or rudimentary civil societies. The disruptions of elections in Iraq, the repeated assassination attempts at the prime minister’s life, the “Anschlusspolitik” in the aforementioned States based on shady alliances, instrumentalization, coercion and the unabashed destruction of democratic polity and civility in Lebanon, the determination to overhaul its geopolitical configuration on the basis of a newly created Shiite political entity, and the recomposition of the regional interstate order, have meticulously proceeded on the multiple interfaces of terrorism and organized criminality and will continue to do so, if consensual and federating political agendas fail to contain the inevitable consequences of a totalitarian dystopia and its strategic mandates.

The psychotic nature of this criminal Islamic dystopia is hardly reformable and elicits inevitably conflicts in a region that lost its multiple gravities. When Naim Kassem (vice Secretary of the Hezbollah) invites opponents to the Hezbollah bolting dictatorship and subversion to quit if they are unhappy, one wonders what’s left of Lebanon’s liberal and democratic credentials, basic civility and future as an independent political entity. The unleashed politics of Islamic imperialism are destructive and put at stake the region’s geopolitical stability, civil concord, European and Western strategic security and World peace at large.