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CTED Trends Tracker | Evolving Trends in the Financing of Foreign Terrorist Fighters’ Activity: 2014 – 2024
Overview
In its resolution 2178 (2014), adopted unanimously on 24 September 2014, the Security Council expressed particular concern over the acute and growing threat posed by foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs), in particular those recruited by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or Da’esh), the Nusrah Front and Al-Qaida. It also underlined the need to disrupt financial flows supporting FTFs, while respecting international human rights law, international refugee law, and international humanitarian law. In that resolution, the Council also directed CTED to identify issues, trends and developments related to FTFs.
In this regard, the Trends Tracker offers a brief examination of how financial flows related to FTF travel and activities have evolved over the past 10 years, reflecting the changes in their locations and circumstances. Financial activity linked to Da’esh-inspired FTFs typically involves supporters collecting or sending small amounts of money abroad or financing their own or others’ travel to zones with terrorist activity. This money typically comes from legal means, often personal savings, and sometimes may be collected on behalf of others. Individuals may coordinate the donations through encrypted mobile applications, send the funds in the form of virtual assets, wire them abroad through a fiat money service business, or, if collected in cash, pass them to couriers. Overall, the financial patterns associated with FTFs have demonstrated remarkable adaptability, shifting from relatively simple methods to increasingly sophisticated and technologically advanced approaches.
Foreseeable Trends
- The decentralization of terrorist groups is likely to lead to a corresponding decentralization in their financing methods, including in relation to any associated FTFs. This may result in an increase in self-financed cells, each adapting to the context-specific needs and circumstances of their operational areas. Such decentralization may also give rise to more lone actors or small cells – making detection and intervention increasingly challenging for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The diversification of funding sources at a local level may further complicate efforts to disrupt larger financial networks.
- Armed conflict contexts in which FTFs operate also raise challenges for impartial humanitarian action where measures to counter the financing of terrorism may result in negative unintended consequences on the provision of vital humanitarian aid.
- Technological advancements will continue to play an important role in the evolution of FTF financing, with an anticipated further increase and sophistication in exploitation of new and emerging financial technologies as they continue to spread across jurisdictions.
- The convergence between terrorist financing and transnational organized crime networks is likely to continue, particularly for financing and FTF-associated travel facilitation purposes.