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                                                                         Nasrallah, Sheikh Hassan (1960– )———253


                  If a cartel becomes large enough and powerful    Further Reading
                enough, its interests may come to be affected by a
                                                                   Dorn, Nicholas, Karim Murji, and Nigel South. Traffickers:
                vast array of political issues not specifically related to
                                                                     Drug Markets and Law Enforcement. London and
                drug production. In the late 1980s and early 1990s,  New York: Routledge, 1992.
                the Medellín cartel of Colombia engaged in a series  Ehrenfeld, Rachel.  Narco-Terrorism. New  York: Basic
                of spectacular political assassinations in an effort to  Books, 1990.
                change Colombia’s extradition laws. Culminating with  Jamieson, Alison, ed. Terrorism and Drug Trafficking in the
                the August 1989 murder of Luis Carlos Galan, a popu-  1990s. Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT: Darmouth,
                lar presidential candidate, the violence of the cartel’s  1994.
                campaign and the cartel’s demonstration that even the  McCoy, Alfred W., Cathleen B. Read, and Leonard Palmer
                country’s highest officials were not safe prompted a  Adams.  The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in
                                                                     the Global Drug Trade. Rev. and exp. ed. New York:
                series of concessions. Columbia’s government amended
                                                                     Lawrence Hill, 1991.
                its extradition laws and offered amnesty to drug dealers
                                                                   Smith, G. Davidson. “Terrorism and the Rule of Law:
                who would lay down their arms.  The head of the
                                                                     Dangerous Compromise in Colombia.” Commentary,
                Medellín cartel, Pablo Escobar, negotiated a 1991 sur-
                                                                     No. 13, October 1991. http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/eng/
                render that included a specially built prison to house  comment/com13_e.html.
                him, a say in the choice of his guards, and various other  “Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists, &  Your  Kids.”
                concessions that, many observers believe, allowed him  National Symposium on Narco-Terrorism  Transcript.
                to run the cartel from inside prison as effectively as he  U.S. Department of Justice Drug Enforcement Admini-
                had outside it.                                      stration, December 4, 2001. http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/
                                                                     deamuseum/symposium.html.

                COMBATING NARCOTERRORISM
                One problem that confronts security forces when    NASRALLAH, SHEIKH HASSAN
                fighting narcoterrorism is its dual nature: narcoterror-  (1960– )
                ism bridges fundamental divisions between the crimi-
                nal and the political, the domestic and the foreign.
                Law enforcement agencies combating criminal vio-     General secretary of the Lebanese Shiite Muslim
                lence within a country (U.S. examples would be local  movement Hezbollah since 1992, Sheikh Hassan
                and state police and the FBI) do not usually share  Nasrallah presided over Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from
                information or conduct investigations in conjunction  southern Lebanon. Nasrallah is said to be Hezbollah’s
                with agencies that monitor outside threats to a country  most diplomatic leader, and is known for guiding the
                (military intelligence, the CIA, and the U.S. State  organization into a more political, rather than violent,
                Department). This lack of coordination and reluctance  role in Lebanon.
                to share information leads to inefficiency, hampers the  The son of a poor vegetable vendor and a descendant
                ability to gather and integrate intelligence, and inter-  of the Prophet Muhammad, Nasrallah fled his home in
                feres with making arrests.                         eastern Beirut in 1975 at the start of the Lebanese civil
                  The terrorist attacks on the United States of    war. He later traveled to Iraq to study theology in the
                September 11, 2001, and the continuing war on terror-  holy Shiite city of Najaf. Like many Shiite leaders,
                ism may lead to the removal of bureaucratic obstacles  Nasrallah left Iraq by decree of President Saddam
                in the fight against narcoterrorism. However, narcoter-  Hussein. When just 21, Nasrallah helped to found the
                rorism is the product of a marriage of convenience  militant Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, or Party
                between two larger social problems—the tremendous  of God. During the 1980s, when Hezbollah made head-
                appetite of  Western societies for illegal drugs and  lines by taking a number of Western hostages, Nasrallah
                political grievances of various groups—whose solu-  served as a commander in Lebanon’s Bekaa region.
                tions are very different.                            When the Lebanese civil war ended in the early
                See also AL QAEDA; LIBERATION TIGERS OF TAMIL EELAM;  1990s, most of the country’s militias disarmed;
                                                                   Hezbollah, however, continued to fight Israeli troops
                  REVOLUTIONARY ARMED FORCES OF COLOMBIA; SHINING
                  PATH; TALIBAN; UNITED SELF-DEFENSE FORCES OF     occupying southern Lebanon. In 1992, Israeli forces
                  COLOMBIA                                         assassinated Nasrallah’s predecessor, Sheikh  Abbas
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