Following the Money: Recap of Insight Monitor for March 2024
All the news and analysis you might have missed.
Hello Insight Monitor subscribers! I’m happy to share that we’ve passed yet another milestone — we now have over 5500 subscribers! It’s great to see so many people interested in illicit financing. If you’re new around here, each month we do a roundup of all the news and analysis we published so you don’t miss out on anything. Don’t forget to share and subscribe if you like what you’re reading. And stay until the end to vote on one article to read for free (no paywall):
The Terrorist Financing Blueprint
This month, I received a request from a colleague asking if we had a “model” of terrorist financing, akin to the money laundering model (placement, layering, and integration). Turns out, as part of my book Illicit Money, I did develop such a model. It builds on other work in terrorist financing, and adds two new elements to the traditional TF model of raise, use, move, store. I add: manage and obscure. We published this as a newsletter, intending it as a resource for anyone working in this space, either as an aide memoire, or even as a teaching aid. It is free to use (with credit), so don’t hesitate to include it in anything you’re working on. The academic source is the book,1 and the image can be credited to Insight Threat Intelligence. I hope you find it useful, and if you have any feedback on the image, let us know!
Group Profiles
As always, we published a couple of group profiles this month. These are part of our core analysis, and we try to publish at least one per month, if not more. (Yes, sadly there are almost always more terrorist and extremist groups in the world that we have yet to cover, despite doing this work for three years now!).
This month, we took a look at AQAP’s financing in Yemen:
We also analyzed Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent and their financing activities:
Global Terrorist Financing Report
Every month, we also provide a summary (and some light analysis) of all the terrorist financing news from the month before. This is free to read for a short time. The February roundup is here:
Entity Financing
We also took a look at a particular platform known to host extremist content, and analyzed how it facilitates both the sharing of extremist material and payments to extremists.
Commentary
Finally, we published my op-ed in the Globe and Mail. I try to get these up on the newsletter within two weeks, and I usually publish the unedited version.
As a thank-you to our subscribers, we like to offer a chance to read one article for free every month. You can vote on what you want to read here, and once the poll closes, I’ll remove the paywall for 3-4 days. You’ll have to come back and see what article gets released!
As always, there’s more content available both on the newsletters website, as well as my website proper, so if you’re looking for something in particular, check it out. You can also send us a note either through the website or through the Substack app.
Thanks for caring about illicit finance!
If you want to learn more about how Hamas finances its activities and its prospects for longevity, have a read of our report:
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Jessica Davis, Illicit Money: Financing Terrorism in the 21st Century (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2021).