The Criminalization of The World Economy.

• Author: Berman, Ilan

A review of Servants of the Devil: The Facilitators of the Criminal and Terrorist Networks by Norman Bailey and Bernard Touboul, World Scientific Publishing, 2021.

Between 2014 and 2016, when it was at the pinnacle of its power, the Islamic State was estimated to be generating as much as $2 billion in annual revenue, a sum that made it the best-funded terrorist group in recorded history. It did so through a variety of means, ranging from informal value transfer networks such as hawala to the taxation of the captive citizens under its control. In all, according to a 2016 report by the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, the Islamic State's complex financial infrastructure encompassed seven distinct pillars: black market oil and natural gas; black market commodities; antiquities; extortion, taxation, and robbery; kidnappings for ransom; support from nation-states in the Gulf; and fraudulent financial activities.

Fast forward half a decade, and the situation remains far too familiar. Despite the ignominious end of its selfdeclared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Islamic State is still fiscally solvent--and dangerous.

Just this spring, the U.S. Treasury department estimated that, in spite of the international community's best efforts, the world's most notorious terror group still had access to around $100 million in cash reserves in safe havens across the Middle East, more than enough to enable it to carry out global operations on an ongoing basis. Moreover, the government memo laid out, these funds are being replenished by multiple sources, including associates in Turkey, smugglers in Iraq, and other facilitators.

The Islamic State's ongoing solvency owes a great deal to the contemporary economic environment, where the lines between licit and illicit commerce have become progressively blurred, and where the connections between criminal groups and terrorist organizations are increasingly intimate. That nexus is the subject of Servants of the Devil, a collection of studies curated by veteran financial experts Norman Bailey and Bernard Touboul. Their central contention is stark but compelling: that the global economic context has changed fundamentally. Gone, they argue, are the days when criminals and terrorists represented qualitatively different things, with separate worldviews and agendas. Instead, propelled by rapid globalization, we are now witnessing growing interplay among--and cooperation between--a wide range of...