The New York Times Equivocates on Ransoms
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Kidnapping Europeans for ransom has become a global business for Al Qaeda, bankrolling its operations across the globe.
While European governments deny paying ransoms, an investigation by The New York Times found that Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year.
In news releases and statements, the United States Treasury Department has cited ransom amounts that, taken together, put the total at around $165 million over the same period.
These payments were made almost exclusively by European governments, who funneled the money through a network of proxies, sometimes masking it as development aid, according to interviews conducted for this article with former hostages, negotiators, diplomats and government officials in 10 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The inner workings of the kidnapping business were also revealed in thousands of pages of internal Qaeda documents found by this reporter while on assignment for The Associated Press in northern Mali last year.
In its early years, Al Qaeda received most of its money from deep-pocketed donors, but counterterrorism officials now believe the group finances the bulk of its recruitment, training and arms purchases from ransoms paid to free Europeans.
Put more bluntly, Europe has become an inadvertent underwriter of Al Qaeda.
The results?
Of the 53 hostages known to have been taken by Qaeda’s official branches in the past five years, a third were French. And small nations like Austria, Spain and Switzerland, which do not have large expatriate communities in the countries where the kidnappings occur, account for over 20 percent of the victims.
By contrast, only three Americans are known to have been kidnapped by Al Qaeda or its direct affiliates, representing just 5 percent of the total.
“For me, it’s obvious that Al Qaeda is targeting them by nationality,” said Jean-Paul Rouiller, the director of the Geneva Center for Training and Analysis of Terrorism, who helped set up Switzerland’s counterterrorism program. “Hostages are an investment, and you are not going to invest unless you are pretty sure of a payout.”
In other words, by paying ransoms, the European governments are incentivizing the kidnapping of their citizens, and the terrorists are unsurprisingly wise to this and responding according to the incentives. By contrast, there is relatively little incentive to kidnap Americans---and it happens much less. Yes, the kidnappers have less incentive to keep those Americans they do capture alive, and what happened to James Foley is a horrific atrocity. But one cannot address it by creating an incentive to capture more journalists.
The Times seems to acknowledge this, and it seems to recognize that it would be better if no country paid ransoms, yet it seems neither morally outraged by European choices on this matter nor to see that there actually is a simple answer to the problem here---albeit one with brutal costs for those unlucky nationals of countries who do not pay and yet get taken anyway. The right answer is not to pay.
