Braxton Taylor
DOHA–Several trends are giving violent extremist groups a brighter, more profitable future, security officials and experts from around the world said this week at the Soufan Center Security Forum here.
Cryptocurrencies and sophisticated use of shell companies are helping them accumulate funds. AI is making recruitment and disinformation a snap. The reduction of social-media monitoring is enabling such campaigns to flourish. The U.S. retreat from multilateral diplomatic efforts is reducing the pressure that kept such groups in check.
All this is making such groups more powerful, independent, and useful as proxy tools for autocratic regimes.
State-backed militias are no longer operating on the margins—they’re deploying increasingly sophisticated weapons and tactics, thanks in part to a surge in funding and arms transfers from autocratic sponsors. Russia, for example, has dispatched the Wagner Group across Ukraine, Africa, and the Middle East. But nowhere is this more evident than in Yemen, where Iran’s material and technical support has transformed the Houthis from a local insurgency into a regional threat. Houthis progressed from firing short-range rockets to launching cruise missiles and drones at targets hundreds of miles away—striking at Saudi oil facilities, Israeli airports, UAE territory, and shipping in international waters.
A new financial era
Extremist groups are finding it easier than ever to accumulate funding.
“Historically, non-state actors had limited options,” said Jan Gleiman, a retired U.S. Army colonel at Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative and a senior fellow at New America. “You had to gather volunteers and donations. If you had territory, you could tax it. If you had the means, you could reach out to the diaspora for support, or, of course, you could take that big risk and go for an external sponsor where you might lose some of your autonomy.”
Gleiman said those limited options have expanded with the rise of cryptocurrencies, the ability to quickly create shell companies, and encrypted transactions. Many non-state actors have developed revenue streams ranging from black-market arms deals to taxation rackets in ungoverned spaces.
An intelligence analyst who tracks non-state actors across the Middle East said digital financial transactions had enabled the groups to expand into rigging and fixing government contracts, then laundering money through those contracts. Local-level corruption, especially in the Middle East, plays a huge role, they said in an interview: “Everybody is on the take.”
Some groups have routineized crime and sabotage for hire. Security experts and intelligence officials say the Wagner group has been using Telegram to find people to commit arson and other crimes.
It’s increasingly common not just in Europe but in New York City, said Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner of New York City’s intelligence and counterterrorism bureau.
“We see this in our city, with transnational criminal groups and one signature is Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, where you have the same kind of contracted-out individual crimes that are being sought using technology as a labor for hire model,” Weiner said.
Then there’s the concept of sponsor state as angel investor. Iran is “smart about how they use money. Iran uses money as seed funding for proxies and then those proxies end up being money-making enterprises for them, not necessarily money- spending,” said retired U.S. Army colonel Gianni Koskinas, a retired U.S. Army colonel-turned-CEO chief executive officer of the Hoplite Group. “At a minimum, they are self-sufficient.”
This new financial era is giving extremist groups more independence from their state backers. It also helps insulate them from international pressure in the form of sanctions. And, Gleiman said, at least some extremist groups may be shifting from the pursuit of ideology to profit.
“How groups mobilize resources can reshape their identity over time. Some begin as politically-motivated but evolve into revenue-driven entities.”
Winning the narrative
Extremists’ ability to recruit, raise funds, and spread disinformation is rising as platform companies reduce their efforts to stop them.
“The Houthis, for example, are selling weapons on X. It really is quite astonishing just how much there is online and just how little has been done about it,” said Adam Hadley, executive director of the U.K. group Tech Against Terrorism.
X owner Elon Musk is not just hostile to content moderation but a spreader of disinformation, said Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, who runs investigations into disinformation campaigns.
And extremists are turbocharging their efforts with AI tools as states dither, said Abdelkader Baggag, a senior scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute.
State actors “are way behind the non-state actors,” Baggag said. “That’s because this [technology] democratization has happened, and the states are caught in a world where they don’t really know what to do, whether it’s a policy, whether it’s law or whatever, the technical capabilities far outpace our ability to formulate policy and formulate regulation.”
The U.S. retreat
In the United States, the Trump administration has dismantled institutions built to counter extremist narratives, such as the Global Engagement Center and Voice for America.
That helps extremists, ASU’s Gleiman said.
“Legitimacy is contested in the narrative space long before it’s contested in the battlefield. Countering violent non-state actors demands investment in local narratives, local messengers and political trusts, not just technical communication strategies and development projects,” he said.
The closure of USAID also deprives those projects of critical funds.
But what most worries Gleiman and other forum attendees is the broader U.S. retreat from international institutions that monitor things like corruption and financial transactions. Brute military force is a poor response to the threat of transnational criminal enterprises, something he said he teaches in his class on irregular warfare. His students. “expect to study guerrilla tactics. They expect to study counter-terrorist missions. But they end up learning about money laundering. They end up learning about the Financial Action Task Force. They end up learning about equity chain mapping and these important aspects.”
The United States is also cutting back on its efforts to monitor foreign interference in elections and monitor corruption. The pullback from those vital areas, both on the international stage and domestically, is the wrong response at the worst time.
“The criticality of being able to counter the resource mobilization of non-state actors—I mean, this requires cooperation around the world.”
What now?
While all of those trends are now accelerating, they are not new. CNN security analyst Peter Bergen pointed out that while President Joe Biden was a big fan of multilateral institutions, the broader U.S. retreat from the global stage, particularly in the form of troop withdrawals from the Middle East, was an established trend well before Trump came into power and that’s a factor as well in the rise of these groups.
“There is basically consensus on the left of the Democratic Party and, on the right, of the Republican Party that we shouldn’t do anything overseas and we should withdraw. But we’ve already run this videotape before, where an absence of American troops produced a vacuum into which ISIS came. And we’ve already seen withdrawals from Syria under the second Trump administration … in the last week or so.”
What does a world increasingly destabilized by amped-up non-state actors look like? Koskinas said to look to Syria, where Russian, U.S., Iranian, Iraqi, and, victoriously, Turkish proxy groups all competed for power.
“In many regards, Syria is an absolute case study in proxy warfare.”
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