Page 18 - An Illusion of Complicity: Terrorism and the Illegal Ivory Trade in East Africa

I. The Collusion of Two Evils?

THE IDEA THAT terrorist groups benefit from the illegal ivory trade has become an increasingly
common assertion in public discourse. This narrative has circulated since at least 2010, gaining
increasing traction since 2013. It is rooted in wider discourses around the growing national
and international security implications of the IWT and concern over a growing crime-conflict-terror
nexus. Several armed non-state groups are frequently referenced in this context, the most common
being the Sudanese Janjaweed, Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and Al-Shabaab.

Al-Shabaab is the only one of these to have been designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization
by the US State Department, despite the fact that the ‘terrorist’ label is frequently used to
reference all three.1 Al-Shabaab’s links to the illegal ivory trade have also attracted particularly
widespread attention. The core narrative advocated by proponents of this view is that ivory has
been a major source of funding for Al-Shabaab and, in turn, that Al-Shabaab has been a major
player in the East African ivory trade.

This assertion rests on two main claims. Firstly, that Al-Shabaab and linked Somali gangs source
ivory by poaching Kenyan elephants directly. Secondly, that Al-Shabaab acts as a key middleman,
trafficking vast quantities of ivory in a chain running through Somalia. Three sets of actors have
been at the forefront of propagating both narratives: NGOs and research institutes; the media;
and politicians. This chapter will consider each in turn.

NGOs and Research Institutes

The single most influential proponent of the Al-Shabaab–ivory trade nexus has been the
California-based Elephant Action League (EAL). A brief report by the organisation published in
January 2013 claimed to detail Al-Shabaab’s involvement in trafficking vast ivory flows through
Somalia. Titled ‘Africa’s White Gold of Jihad’, its assertions were based on an eighteen-month
undercover investigation in East Africa. Its headline contention was that Al-Shabaab’s income,
from a monthly export of 1–3 tonnes of ivory, amounted to as much as $200,000–$600,000 a
month. This, it was argued, contributed as much as 40 per cent of the group’s running costs.2

1. US Department of State, Bureau of Counterterrorism, ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’, <http://
www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm>, accessed 17 August 2015. Both the Janjaweed
and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) appear on the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium’s
database (http://www.trackingterrorism.org), the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism
and Responses to Terrorism Global Terrorism Database (http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd) and the
National Counterterrorism Center’s Counterterrorism Guide (http://www.nctc.gov/site/index.
html), amongst others.

2. Nir Kalron and Andrea Crosta, ‘Africa’s White Gold of Jihad: Al-Shabaab and Conflict Ivory’,
Elephant Action League, January 2013, <http://elephantleague.org/project/africas-white-gold-of-
jihad-al-shabaab-and-conflict-ivory/>, accessed 17 August 2015.