In his latest column for World Defense Review, FDD Academic Fellow J. Peter Pham looks at how global arms dealers can be useful in the war against Militant Islamic terrorists:
The networks that supply the terrorists are, in fact, the Achilles heel through which U.S. and allied intelligence and security services can potentially gain access to groups of interest by exploiting the latter's need to purchase the arms from international dealers like Bout and his kind.
Fortuitously, when it comes to shady financial deals, even the most ideologically driven terrorist discovers pragmatism. As Douglas Farah of the Washington Post has exposed, for example, al-Qaeda regularly traded with former Liberian president Charles Taylor; this is significant because the tyrant, as I point out in my own book on the conflict in the West African country, when he wasn't playing Baptist revival preacher was the self-proclaimed "supreme zo (witch doctor) of Liberia" – in either case, hardly a paragon of tawhīd, the rigorous Islamic concept of monotheism.
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