Blood from Stones The Secret Financial Network of Terror

CHAPTER ONE: Blood from Stones I was doing my monthly expense reports at theWashington Post'sWest Africa bureau, based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on September 11, 2001. From Abidjan I covered some twenty countries in Western and Central Africa, traveling and writing stories on everything from wars to HIV/AIDS to politics and human interest stories. A friend called in the middle of the afternoon and asked if I was watching television. No, I laughed, I was doing my bookkeeping so I could get to my 5 p.m. tennis date. She urged me to watch, saying something very bad had happened. Stunned, I turned on CNN and watched as events unfolded. In the following days the foreign desk at thePostwas interested in anything and everything related to terrorism, but I didn't see how my beat, covering largely poor and obscure West African countries, fit into that. I knew thousands of Lebanese lived in West Africa, controlling much of the commerce and monopolizing the diamond trade. I also knew that most of the Lebanese community was Shi'ite Muslim but that there was also a sprinkling of Christians. My grandfather, a Christian born in Damascus, Syria, had migrated to the United States in the early 1900s. He was part of the same exodus from what was called Greater Syria that landed many Lebanese on the coast of West Africa. From the beginning of my time on the beat I had heard rumors that radical groups from the Middle East used diamonds to fund their activities. But I had no idea that my beat was at the center of some of al Qaeda's most vital financial operations and that my story would land me there too. In June 2001, all around the gutted town of Kono in eastern Sierra Leone, thousands of young men, dressed only in tiny strips of underwear and tattered T-shirts and armed with buckets and shovels, swarmed into streams and over hills of mud in search of diamonds. Working in teams, one group would dig up mounds of earth and gravel. Another group would move the mud to the round screen sifters held by others. Carefully, the gravel was washed in rivers and streams and examined for the precious stones. The difference between a piece of gravel and a rough diamond is invisible to the untrained eye. In a frenzy of barely harnessed labor, some worked in narrow, deep pits surrounded by twenty feet of mud. Deaths from cave-ins were frequent. In the mad scramble, workers dug under the foundations of abandoned, burned-out houses, causing collapses. The intervention of recently arrived United Nations peacekeepers prevented a greater tragedy by halting the digging under the pylons supporting the only bridge that connected the region to the outside world. At the end of each day the miners, watched by heavily armed guards of the Revolutionary United Front, had to strip and wash every body cavity where a stone could be hidden. The RUF had been founded in 1991 as part of the strategy of Libyan leader Mu'ammar Gadhafi to spread revolution across Africa. While claiming to fight to end to Sierra Leone's notorious corruption, the rebels had quickly degenerated into a brutal occupation force in parts of the tiny nation. It was an army that had neither a coherent ideology nor a revolutionary credo. The rush on one of the world's richest diamond fields in the steaming West African tropics was spurred by strangers offering exorbitant prices for the better-quality stones. Few knew who the buyers were. The remote mining region had been under the control of the hermetic and brutal RUF since 1997, and few outsiders had been there in the previous four years. Long used to selling diamonds to outside buyers chosen by their secretive leadership, the rebel commanders on the ground didn't ask many questions. They just dubbed the new patrons "bad Lebanese," believing them to be part of the Lebanese diamond-buying network that had controlled diamond sales in that country for decades. The buyersFarah, Douglas is the author of 'Blood from Stones The Secret Financial Network of Terror', published 2004 under ISBN 9780767915625 and ISBN 0767915623.