In 1931 an Italian general crossed hundreds of miles of waterless desert with three thousand troops and roughly twenty bombers to take a group of oases in southeastern Libya. He later called it the greatest operation ever accomplished in the Sahara. For years afterwards, travellers continued to find the bodies of the people who had fled, mummified by the dryness.

In 1941 a Free French column under Leclerc covered something like a thousand miles from Lake Chad, with early assistance from the British Long Range Desert Group, and took the same place from the Italians. On 1 March the garrison surrendered. The following day Leclerc and his men swore an oath not to lay down arms until the French flag flew over Strasbourg cathedral, which it did on 23 November 1944.

In 2024 and 2025, satellite imagery showed the runway there being renovated and extended, heavy cargo aircraft appearing where none had been the year before, and flights operated by carriers previously named in United Nations reporting on weapons trafficking.

Kufra is the same oasis in all three paragraphs, and it is the node the modern corridor runs through. The holders change about once a generation. The reason nobody can leave it alone has not changed in a hundred and fifty years, and it is not strategic in any abstract sense.

It is water.

Why Kufra exists at all

Kufra sits in the Libyan Desert, a sub-region of the eastern Sahara, roughly a thousand kilometres from the Mediterranean and surrounded on several sides by sand seas that are effectively impassable to anything that cannot carry its own supply.

What makes it habitable is groundwater close enough to the surface to support date palms and cultivation. The Senussi who made it their capital tilled the soil, irrigated, and grew grain, vegetables, melons and dates in a place where nothing else grows for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.

That single fact generates everything that follows. In a desert, a route is not a line on a map. It is a sequence of places where water can be obtained, and the distance between them has to be shorter than the range of whatever is doing the travelling. Change the range and you change the map.

A camel caravan needs water every few days. A truck column needs water and fuel. An aircraft needs a runway, and a runway in a place like that requires people to maintain it, who require water. Each technology changed the spacing of the required stops and none of them removed the requirement.

That is worth holding against the intuition that modern transport makes geography irrelevant. It makes geography less binding, which is a different claim. A route that needed a stop every eighty kilometres now needs one every eight hundred, and the number of qualifying locations falls accordingly, which concentrates value on the survivors rather than dispersing it.

Kufra is where the stops are, which is why it has been fought over by the Senussi order, the Kingdom of Italy, Free France, Britain, Gaddafi’s Libya, two competing Libyan communities, and the Libyan National Army, in that order, across a century and a half.

The Senussi capital

The Senussi order, a Sufi religious and political movement, transferred its headquarters to Kufra in 1895, and the choice is the first demonstration of the principle.

A movement with influence across the central Sahara needed a base that its enemies could not easily reach. European powers were advancing from the coasts, the order had begun resisting French expansion from around 1906, and the Ottoman sultan was cultivating the Senussi leadership as a counterweight to the European scramble.

Kufra answered the problem geographically. A thousand kilometres of desert in every direction is a better defence than a fortress, provided you hold the water in the middle of it. The order could move across that desert because it knew where the wells were, and an invading army could not because it did not.

That advantage held for thirty-six years. It ended when somebody solved the logistics, which is the only way any of these positions has ever ended.

What Graziani actually did

The Italian campaign of 1931 is the hinge, and what makes it significant is not the fighting.

The engagement itself was short. What was remarkable, and what the Italians boasted about afterwards, was the navigational and organisational achievement of moving three thousand soldiers with artillery and air support across hundreds of miles of waterless terrain and arriving in a condition to fight. Graziani spent the autumn of 1930 reconnoitring the routes from the north and west, and the campaign was described afterwards as one of the largest desert operations yet attempted.

That is a logistics operation with a battle at the end of it, and it is the template for everything in this subject. The desert had protected Kufra because crossing it was harder than taking it. Once an industrial state applied motor transport, aerial reconnaissance, surveyed routes and pre-positioned supply to the problem, the protection evaporated.

The Italians then did what every subsequent holder has done. They built infrastructure: a fort with wireless masts, an aircraft hangar, a windmill and a reservoir. Graziani organised a compound and base of operations and used it to extend control across southern Libya.

Note what is on that list. A radio, an aircraft hangar, and a water reservoir, built in 1931. The oasis stopped being a destination and became a node. A place people travelled to had become a place things travelled through, and the distinction is the whole of what this subject is about.

The airfield, which is older than anybody assumes

The detail that makes Kufra belong in a course about air logistics rather than desert warfare is that it has been an aviation facility for ninety years.

Before the Second World War, the oasis served as an important refuelling point for Italian aircraft flying to Asmara in Eritrea. Buma Airfield was built there in the 1930s as a minor Italian facility, and it is the direct ancestor of the airport operating today.

Think about what that means. Italy’s problem in the 1930s was connecting Libya to its East African colonies across a continent it did not control. The aircraft of the period could not make the distance without stopping, and the only usable stop was the oasis.

That is the same problem, with the same solution, that produced everything downstream. An aircraft with insufficient range to overfly a region must land in it, and where it lands is determined by where a runway can be maintained, which is determined by water. The modern Ilyushins crossing the same airspace have considerably better range and land at Kufra for a different reason, which is that the cargo is going to a place a thousand kilometres further on with no runway worth using. Range solved the refuelling problem and did not solve the destination problem, and the destination problem is the one that matters.

Leclerc, and the axis that keeps reappearing

The 1941 capture deserves attention for a reason that has nothing to do with the oath.

Leclerc came from Lake Chad. The Free French column crossed roughly a thousand miles of desert from French Equatorial Africa to take a Libyan oasis, with reconnaissance and early support from the Long Range Desert Group, besieging the position from 31 January to 1 March.

The Chad-to-Kufra axis is the same axis that the Libyan expeditionary force used in reverse in the 1980s, staging south through these oases into northern Chad. It is the same axis that carries cargo today.

Three different wars, three different sets of belligerents, three different technologies, one route. The route is not a tradition or a preference. It is the only line across that terrain where the gaps between water are short enough to cross.

After the capture, Kufra became an Allied base, garrisoned by a company of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, about two companies of the Sudan Defence Force, and a company of the Long Range Desert Group. The LRDG used it as a forward operating base for the deep patrols that are the direct ancestor of every long-range desert vehicle operation since.

The hazard of the place is recorded too. In April 1942 a South African Air Force detachment of three Blenheims was ordered to Kufra, became lost, and landed about a hundred and fifty kilometres northeast of it. Navigation error in that terrain is not an inconvenience. The glazed navigator’s station on a Soviet freighter exists because of exactly this, four decades later, over the same kind of ground.

The water problem, inverted

The Gaddafi era produced the strangest development in the oasis’s history, and it is a resource story rather than a military one.

Kufra sits above the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, one of the largest bodies of fresh groundwater on earth and overwhelmingly fossil water, accumulated during wetter periods and not meaningfully recharging under current conditions.

Libya built an enormous engineering project to pump that water north through pipelines to the coastal cities and agricultural schemes, and the Kufra basin became a wellfield. Circular pivot irrigation schemes appeared around the oasis, visible from orbit as green discs in an otherwise featureless desert.

The inversion is worth stating plainly. For a century and a half, Kufra mattered because it was the only place in the region with water. The modern Libyan state’s response was to extract that water and send it somewhere with more people.

Which is a reasonable thing for a government to do with a national resource, and it means the asset that gives the place its entire strategic significance is a stock being drawn down rather than a flow being used. Fossil water does not come back on any timescale relevant to policy. The resource-extraction logic that governs so much of this subject applies to the thing that made the crossroads possible in the first place. A gold seam and an aquifer are the same kind of asset: a stock, finite, being drawn down by whoever holds the ground above it, with the proceeds leaving by air.

Who holds Kufra now, and how that happened

Libya after 2011 produced a contest over Kufra that was explicitly about control of transit revenue.

The oasis sits on routes carrying migrants north from Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and the Horn toward the Mediterranean, alongside smuggled goods, fuel, and latterly artisanal gold. Control of the town is control of the taxation of all of it, which makes Kufra a revenue asset rather than merely a military one, and revenue assets are fought over more persistently than positions.

That produced armed conflict between the Toubou, whose communities straddle the Libya-Chad-Niger frontiers and who historically controlled desert routes, and the Zuwayya, the dominant Arab community in the town. There had been a confrontation with the Toubou under Gaddafi in 2008, and open clashes between the two in 2012.

The town today sits within territory controlled by the Libyan National Army under Khalifa Haftar, which dominates eastern and southern Libya, with an allied local militia involved in the transit business. An LNA officer in Kufra has told reporters that cargo flights there transport civilians, soldiers and police between Libyan airports, and that no Sudanese paramilitary fighters are present. The LNA has repeatedly denied backing the Rapid Support Forces or taking sides in Sudan’s war.

Haftar, as it happens, was a Libyan officer taken prisoner in Chad during the 1987 campaign that staged through these oases. He is now the man who controls them, which is a continuity worth noting without over-reading.

The runway, 2024 to 2026

The current chapter is documented by satellite imagery and flight data rather than by anybody’s testimony, which is a change in how this story gets told.

Reuters reporting drawing on satellite imagery, flight tracking and United Nations documents described a transformation of the airport during 2024. By June, local airlines had begun scheduled flights between Kufra and Benghazi. The more significant change was in heavy cargo: no large cargo aircraft appeared in Copernicus satellite images from 2023, and by April 2024 at least one appeared in six of seven images. Flight tracking indicated several of those flights were operated by carriers previously cited in United Nations reporting on weapons trafficking linked to the Emirates.

Separate imagery from July 2025 showed at least two Russian-built transport aircraft on the ground, which observers assessed as indicating movement of military equipment or specialised personnel with reasonable certainty.

The airfield lies roughly three hundred kilometres from the Sudanese border. Shipments of arms from Kufra toward Darfur were reported from May 2025, notwithstanding the United Nations arms embargo, and geolocated video has been used to establish a Sudanese paramilitary presence in the town. Traffic had shifted north to Kufra as scrutiny of the Chadian route increased, which is a corridor rerouting rather than closing.

Abu Dhabi denies supporting any side in Sudan’s war. The LNA denies backing the paramilitary. Sudan’s army has repeatedly accused the group of moving military cargo through Libya.

Then the fighting reached the border itself. In June 2025 there was an engagement at the Jabal al-Uwaynat massif, the three-way junction of Libya, Egypt and Sudan, with Sudan’s army accusing Haftar’s forces of participating alongside the paramilitary, and Haftar’s government describing it as an attack on a Libyan patrol.

The corridor now has a contested entrance.

What this geography actually dictates

Strip out the politics and the physical constraints produce the behaviour, which is the useful part.

The desert has few regulated entry points, which is a consequence of there being few places anybody can physically be. A frontier running through sand seas is not a line anyone patrols. It is a formality crossed at the small number of points where crossing is possible, and those points are known to everybody who uses the desert and to nobody else. That asymmetry of local knowledge is older than any of the states involved and has survived all of them.

An air bridge terminating at Kufra solves a specific problem. Cargo from the Gulf can reach eastern Libya through ordinary civil aviation with ordinary paperwork. Moving it onward to Darfur by air requires a destination runway and invites interdiction, as the destruction of a cargo aircraft at Nyala in May 2025 demonstrated. Moving it the last leg overland through unpoliced desert is slow and reaches a place nothing else reaches.

So the pattern that emerged is not a design. It is the only configuration the geography permits: long-haul air to a node with a runway, then surface transport across terrain nobody can monitor.

That is identical in structure to what the Senussi were doing with camels, to what Graziani did with motor columns, and to what Leclerc did coming the other way. The vehicles improved. The nodes did not move, because the water did not move. Flags, registries and corporate structures can be relocated in an afternoon. An aquifer cannot.

The claims that do not hold up

An audit, since remote places attract confident assertion in inverse proportion to the evidence available.

Kufra became strategically important recently is contradicted by a hundred and fifty years of people fighting over it.

The desert is a barrier is only true relative to a technology. It was a barrier to armies before motor transport, briefly not a barrier after it, and is now a barrier to surveillance rather than to movement.

Nobody knows what goes on there is less true than it has ever been. Satellite imagery and flight tracking have made the airfield one of the better-documented pieces of infrastructure in the Sahara.

The LNA controls Kufra overstates a situation involving allied militias, local communities with their own interests in the transit economy, and a town where control has changed repeatedly.

The air bridge is the whole supply route ignores the overland leg, which is where most of the distance and all of the unobservability sit.

The Great Man-Made River made the desert bloom is a partial description of a project pumping fossil water that does not replenish.

Haftar’s capture in 1987 explains his current conduct is a tidy narrative that outruns the evidence. He was captured, he left, he returned, and the connecting reasoning is contested.

This is a Libyan problem or a Sudanese problem misdescribes a corridor that has always been international and that currently involves at least five states.

What Kufra is actually telling us

The lesson is about the durability of physical constraints relative to everything built on top of them.

Over a century and a half, the oasis has been held by a Sufi order, a fascist empire, a Free French column, a British long-range reconnaissance unit, a revolutionary republic, two competing communities, and a general’s private army. Every one of those holders had different objectives, different allies, different technology and different enemies.

Every one of them wanted the same thing for the same reason, and the reason is that there is nowhere else to stop.

That is worth generalising because it cuts against how this subject is usually narrated. The story is normally told through people: an operator, a general, a trafficker, a sanctioned brother. Those people are real and they are substitutable. What is not substitutable is a place where water is obtainable in a thousand kilometres of desert, with ground flat and firm enough for a runway, within reach of a border nobody can police.

There are very few such places. The map of them has barely changed since the camel. And the consequence is that the corridor this investigation follows was not chosen by anybody. It was the only one available, and every party that has ever needed to move something across that desert has independently arrived at the same set of coordinates.

An Italian general called taking it the greatest operation ever accomplished in the Sahara. A French colonel swore an oath there about a cathedral two thousand miles away. A Libyan militia now taxes what passes through. None of them picked the location. The water did.

The 9/11 Commission’s own staff investigated how the attacks were paid for and reached a conclusion that sits uncomfortably beside everything the United States did afterwards.

The hijackers used wire transfers from overseas, cash and travellers cheques carried in, and foreign bank accounts accessed from inside the country. They opened accounts at Bank of America, SunTrust and a scattering of smaller regional banks. Twelve of them used the same bank. Their transfers ran from five thousand to seventy thousand dollars and were, in the Commission’s phrase, utterly anonymous among the billions moving daily through the global system. No financial institution filed a suspicious activity report on any transaction by any of the nineteen before the attacks.

And the Commission’s appendix on plot financing states it without qualification: the extensive investigation revealed no evidence that the hijackers used hawala or any other informal value transfer mechanism to fund the plot in whole or in part.

The attacks were financed through the regulated banking system, by people using it exactly as millions of others do.

Within two months the President of the United States stood at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, flanked by the heads of Justice, Treasury and State, and announced action against hawala, the settlement layer underneath the entire gray-market logistics economy.

What hawala actually is

Before the policy, the mechanism, because almost every account of this subject gets the mechanism wrong in a way that makes the policy look more sensible than it was.

A sender in one country gives cash to a broker, a hawaladar, along with the recipient’s details and often a passcode. The broker contacts a counterpart in the destination country, agreeing the amount, the exchange rate and the fee. The counterpart pays the recipient in local currency, usually within hours. The two brokers settle between themselves later.

The critical feature is in that description and it is easy to miss. No money crosses a border. There are two entirely domestic cash transactions and a debt between two people. Nothing transits the international financial system, because no international transaction occurs.

That is why hawala defeats border controls, and it is not because hawala is secretive. A wire transfer is an instruction routed through correspondent banks, each sitting in a jurisdiction with reporting obligations, which is why a wire can be frozen, traced and reported. A hawala transfer presents no such object. There is nothing in transit to intercept.

Settlement between the brokers happens later and by several routes: netting against flows running the other way, reverse transactions, over- or under-invoiced trade in physical goods, occasional bank transfers, gold, or cash. Invoice manipulation by hawaladars has been documented in American case law.

The economics explain the persistence better than any cultural account. Hawala moves value in hours where banks take days. Commissions run around two percent against bank charges, exchange spreads and account-opening requirements that can be far higher. It functions where banks have no branches, where capital controls bite, and where official and parallel exchange rates diverge. In parts of Somalia and Afghanistan it has been the only channel through which funds can be transmitted at all.

The overwhelming majority of its volume is migrant workers sending wages home. It is, in its ordinary operation, the financial infrastructure of labour migration, and the trade this subject documents is a rounding error on top of it.

Al-Barakaat

The response to 9/11 produced one flagship action, and the United States government’s own subsequent investigation is the most damning document about it.

Al-Barakaat, founded in 1985, had more than a hundred and eighty offices in forty countries by 2001 and was Somalia’s largest private employer. It existed primarily to move money to Somalia, a country with no functioning banking system, which is why it existed at all. Somalia had no central bank, no correspondent banking relationships and no mechanism by which an ordinary wire transfer could reach a recipient in Mogadishu, so a different way had to be found and al-Barakaat was it.

On 7 November 2001 the United States designated it. The President called it the quartermasters of terror. The United Nations and the European Union followed. Assets belonging to sixty-two people across ten countries were frozen in the combined action against al-Barakaat and a second entity.

Then the examination. The 9/11 Commission’s staff monograph devoted a chapter to the case, and its findings are worth quoting in substance.

Analysts working the designations were told they did not need evidence that each al-Barakaat entity took part in terrorist financing; it was sufficient to show that the main entity itself was implicated. The designations relied on what the Commission called a derivative designation theory, in which no direct proof of culpability was needed, with business directories used to justify closing individual branches.

An investigation conducted with Emirati cooperation revealed no smoking gun, testimonial or documentary, showing that al-Barakaat funded al-Qaeda or any affiliated group. The Commission’s chapter heading states the conclusion flatly: no direct evidence that al-Barakaat funded terrorism.

And then the sentence that should govern any assessment of the policy. Commission staff uncovered no evidence that closing the al-Barakaat network hurt al-Qaeda.

The United Nations estimated that the freeze cut remittances to Somalia substantially, in a country where remittances were a principal source of household income and where there was no banking system to absorb the displaced volume.

The last al-Barakaat representatives were removed from the American list in August 2006. The company had been destroyed, the evidence was never produced, and the delisting took five years. Somalia’s largest private employer was removed from the economy on a theory its own government’s commission subsequently described as requiring no direct proof.

What al-Qaeda actually used

The honest version of this story is more complicated than either camp’s, and the Commission documented both halves.

Before 9/11, al-Qaeda did rely heavily on hawala and couriers to move substantial sums for its activities in Afghanistan. Usama bin Laden and the organisation made significant use of hawalas in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan, and hawala became particularly important after the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings.

At the same time, al-Qaeda operational cells outside Afghanistan made extensive use of the formal financial system, sending and receiving international wire and bank-to-bank transfers.

So both statements are true and they describe different functions. Hawala moved organisational money within a region where formal banking was absent or hostile. Formal banking moved operational money to cells in countries where banks were everywhere and transactions below reporting thresholds were invisible.

The 9/11 plot was the second category. The amounts were small relative to the system they moved through, the transactions were unremarkable, and the attack was financed for something in the range of four to five hundred thousand dollars through institutions subject to every control the United States had.

Which produces the awkward finding. Hawala was a real part of al-Qaeda’s finances. It was not the part that paid for 9/11, and the policy response treated it as though it were.

The regulatory architecture that followed

The response was fast, international, and durable.

In October 2001 the Financial Action Task Force issued eight Special Recommendations on terrorist financing, with Special Recommendation VI addressing alternative remittance systems and requiring that money and value transfer services be licensed or registered and subjected to anti-money-laundering obligations. It was later folded into the consolidated recommendations.

Section 359 of the USA PATRIOT Act brought informal value transfer systems explicitly within the American money transmitting framework, which made operating an unregistered hawala a federal offence and produced a stream of prosecutions.

The intent was to formalise. Register the brokers, impose record-keeping, apply customer identification, and bring an unmonitored channel into view.

In places with functioning states and a regulatory culture, that partly worked. In places without them, it did two things instead. It criminalised the only available financial infrastructure, and it created a formal-sector liability that made the problem worse by a route nobody intended.

De-risking, which is the part that backfired

The second-order effect is the one that reshaped the system, and it came from banks rather than from regulators.

Faced with heavy penalties for anti-money-laundering failures and limited ability to verify what a money service business in a conflict zone was doing, large banks did the rational thing and exited the relationship. Correspondent banking ties to high-risk jurisdictions were closed. Accounts belonging to money transfer operators were shut.

That is de-risking, and its consequence is perverse in a specific and predictable way. A remittance corridor that loses its formal channel does not lose its volume. The money still has to reach the family in Mogadishu or Kabul, because the family is dependent on it. So the volume moves to whatever channel remains, and the remaining channel is the informal one.

The regulatory effort to bring hawala into the formal system, combined with the liability regime that made serving hawala operators dangerous for banks, pushed volume out of the formal system and into hawala.

Twelve years after Special Recommendation VI, the Financial Action Task Force’s own report on hawala and similar service providers acknowledged that two competing and conflicting views still stood, that these providers remain in many cases the only channel through which funds can be transmitted in parts of Somalia and Afghanistan, and that terrorists continued to use them.

That is a standard-setter reporting, a decade on, that the measure neither eliminated the misuse nor supplied an alternative to the people who depend on the system.

Why this matters for cargo

The connection to aircraft is direct and it is the reason this sits where it does.

A charter flight into a contested airfield requires payment. The operator wants money, the broker wants a commission, the crew want wages, the fuel supplier wants cash, and the ground handler at the destination wants paying in whatever currency works there. The crews in this trade are nationals of several countries with bank accounts in none of the relevant ones, which is its own settlement problem.

A wire transfer for that flight creates a record in multiple jurisdictions with a payer, a payee, an amount, a date and a stated purpose. It is the single most traceable artifact the entire transaction will generate, considerably more revealing than a flight plan or a cargo manifest, and it is the one piece of evidence that would survive a hostile investigation intact.

Hawala removes it. The customer settles locally in one currency, the operator receives locally in another, and the obligation between the two brokers nets out against unrelated flows over subsequent weeks, most of which are migrant remittances having nothing to do with anybody’s cargo. No instruction crosses a border and no correspondent bank sees anything.

Which completes the architecture the preceding lectures have assembled. The aircraft carries a registration from a state that sells them. The operating company is licensed in a free zone that does not publish its owner. The crew hold licences from somewhere else. The cargo is described on paper as something plausible. And the payment is a ledger entry between two men who have never met the customer.

Every element relocates a checkable fact into a jurisdiction that will not check it. Hawala is simply that principle applied to money, and it is the oldest of the techniques by several centuries, predating flags of convenience, free zones and air cargo by roughly a thousand years.

The gold connection

There is a specific interaction with the commodity that funds a great deal of this trade, and it is worth isolating.

Hawala brokers settle their mutual balances by several routes, and physical gold is one of them. Gold is dense, portable, universally valued, and carries no origin once refined, which makes it an excellent settlement medium between two brokers who have accumulated an imbalance.

That means a gold trade and a hawala obligation can be the same transaction viewed from two angles. A shipment of refined metal moving from one jurisdiction to another can discharge a debt between brokers that arose from entirely unrelated remittances, and the commodity flow and the value flow are then impossible to separate without seeing both ledgers.

For an organisation financing itself by extracting and exporting gold, that is an unusually convenient property. The commodity is the product and the settlement mechanism simultaneously.

What the brokers are actually risking

The system’s resilience is frequently attributed to secrecy and it is more accurately attributed to collateral of a different kind.

A hawaladar pays out against an instruction from a counterpart who owes him nothing enforceable. There is no contract a court would recognise, no security, and no recourse. If the counterpart defaults, the loss falls entirely on the broker who paid.

What makes that survivable is that the brokers are usually bound by something stronger than contract: family, clan, community, long trading relationships, and a reputation that is the whole of their business. A hawaladar who fails to settle does not face litigation. He faces exclusion from the only network that gives his business any value, in a community that will know within days.

That is a genuine enforcement mechanism and it is more reliable in its own domain than a commercial court in a failed state. It is also why the system cannot easily be infiltrated or scaled by outsiders, and why a new entrant with no standing cannot simply open a desk.

The regulatory implication is awkward. The feature making hawala trustworthy is the same feature making it opaque. You cannot keep the trust network and remove the closed community it runs on, because they are the same thing.

What formalisation actually achieved

Two decades on, an honest ledger on the regulatory project is mixed rather than empty, and the successes deserve statement alongside the failures.

Registration regimes in states with functioning administration brought a substantial volume of remittance activity into view that was previously invisible. Licensed money transfer operators in the Gulf, South Asia and Europe now file reports, maintain customer records and are subject to supervision. Prosecutions of unregistered transmitters have disrupted specific criminal networks.

The travel rule, requiring originator and beneficiary information to accompany transfers, closed the anonymity that the 9/11 hijackers’ wire transfers exploited. That is a real improvement addressed at the channel that was actually used.

What did not work was the attempt to apply the same framework in places with no administration to apply it. A registration requirement in Somalia in 2002 was a demand that a state which did not exist license an industry that was substituting for it.

And the aggregate effect on the corridors that mattered most was negative, because de-risking removed the formal option without removing the demand. The policy succeeded where there was already a banking system and failed where there was not, which is the opposite of where it was needed.

The claims that do not hold up

An audit, since this subject attracts more confident misinformation than almost anything else in the field.

Hawala funded 9/11 is contradicted directly by the 9/11 Commission’s own investigation, which found no evidence of informal value transfer in the plot.

Hawala is a terrorist financing system describes a tiny fraction of volume in a system overwhelmingly used by migrant workers remitting wages, and misdescribes a settlement mechanism as a purpose.

Hawala is illegal is false as a general statement. It is lawful and regulated in many jurisdictions and unlawful only where operators fail to register under local money transmitting rules, which is an offence of licensing rather than of substance.

Hawala leaves no records is wrong. Hawaladars keep ledgers, because the entire system is built on settling obligations between brokers and an unrecorded obligation cannot be settled. The records are private rather than absent, which is a different problem.

Al-Barakaat was a hawala is a point the Commission itself made: it was a money remitter with similarities to hawala rather than a hawala network, and the distinction mattered to the investigation.

The crackdown on hawala was effective is contradicted by the Commission’s finding that closing al-Barakaat produced no evidence of damage to al-Qaeda, and by the Financial Action Task Force’s own acknowledgment a decade later that misuse continued.

Formalisation is the answer ignores the de-risking consequence, in which formalisation plus liability drove banks out of the corridors and pushed volume back into the informal system.

Hawala is a relic that digital payments will replace misreads the demand. It persists where banking does not reach, where currency controls bind, and where exchange rates diverge, which describes a great deal of the geography this subject covers, and digital rails inherit the same correspondent-banking chokepoints that made hawala attractive.

What hawala after 9/11 is actually telling us

Two findings, and the second one generalises past money entirely.

The first is that the response targeted the wrong system for an understandable reason. Hawala is foreign, informal, poorly documented in English, and genuinely used by bad actors. Formal banking is domestic, familiar, regulated and respectable, and it was the system that actually moved the money. The instinct to act against the unfamiliar channel is not corrupt. It is a bias, and the cost of it was borne by Somali families whose remittances stopped. The same instinct recurs wherever an unfamiliar structure is easier to designate than a familiar one.

The second is structural and it is the point this subject keeps arriving at. Hawala is not a method of concealment. It is a method of ensuring that the thing an investigator would want to examine never comes into existence.

A concealed transaction can be uncovered. An unrecorded one can be reconstructed from the records of the parties. But a transaction that never crossed a border cannot be found at the border, because the border is not a place it ever was. The same logic governs a flag that relocates an aircraft’s legal identity and a corporate register that exists and is not published. In none of those cases is anybody hiding. In every case the fact that would answer the question has been moved into a jurisdiction with no obligation to answer it.

A system that predates European banking by roughly a thousand years, built by traders who needed to move value across territory without carrying it, turned out to be the perfect instrument for a trade that moves cargo across borders without being seen to. Nobody designed it for that, any more than anybody designed a Soviet freighter for it. It simply has the property, and the property was always the point.

The hijackers wired the money through SunTrust. Somalia lost its remittances. Those two facts are the entire lesson, and the trade this subject documents went on settling its accounts exactly as it had before.

Al Junaid Multi Activities Company Limited was a Sudanese holding company based in Khartoum with eleven subsidiaries across gold mining, livestock, construction and transport. Its directors were two brothers. One of them commanded a paramilitary force of several hundred thousand men. The other was that force’s deputy commander.

The company’s name, Al Junaid, means the soldiers.

By the early 2020s its asset base was valued at around a billion dollars with annual revenues in the range of a hundred and sixty to a hundred and eighty million. Around it sat roughly fifty further companies: a construction firm, an IT firm, a medical firm, a general trading company in Dubai, a majority stake in a Khartoum bank, a security company, a furnishings store in Rwanda, an interior design business in the Emirates, a mining company in Mali, and an importer of baby formula. The diversification is the tell: a criminal enterprise launders, and an organisation that buys a furnishings store in Rwanda is investing.

This is what happened to the Janjaweed after 2003. It did not disband, and it did not simply become a state force. It incorporated, diversified, opened offices abroad, appointed nominees, and eventually went to war with the government that created it, funded by its own balance sheet.

Janjaweed Inc is not a metaphor. It is a corporate structure with a sanctions listing, and tracing how a mobilised militia acquired one is the most instructive case in this subject of a client becoming a principal.

What the Janjaweed was for

The origin is a counter-insurgency problem and the solution was deniability, which is the same solution this subject has been documenting since 1950.

When rebellions broke out in Darfur in 2003, Khartoum mobilised Arab militias, principally from camel-herding Abbala communities, arming and directing them against non-Arab populations. The campaign produced the atrocities that led to a genocide determination and an International Criminal Court indictment of the president.

An American assessment states the logic without decoration: the government unleashed the Janjaweed in Darfur because both the deniability and the out-of-control nature of the militia helped achieve military objectives that would have been significantly harder with conventional forces alone.

Read that carefully, because it contains two distinct products rather than one. Deniability is the obvious one. The second is that the force’s indiscipline was itself useful, since a regular army committing the same acts is the state committing them, and a militia doing so is a regrettable excess by irregulars the government cannot fully control.

That is the Air America proposition applied to ground forces, with an additional feature. A proprietary airline was deniable and controlled. A militia is deniable and not controlled, and the lack of control is part of what is being purchased. Excess by irregulars is a diplomatic problem. Excess by a national army is a legal one, and the difference is worth something to a government facing an international court.

The problem with buying that product is the one every sponsor in this subject eventually encounters. A force you do not control is a force you do not control.

How the Janjaweed became a company

The transformation happened in identifiable steps and each one is documented.

In 2007 a faction under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, a former camel trader from the Rizeigat with no formal military training, broke with Khartoum over a lack of financial support. There was also a dispute with Musa Hilal, the tribal leader then serving as militia commander.

Khartoum resolved it commercially. It replaced Hilal with Hemedti, promised retroactive financial support, armed his forces, and granted military ranks to his fighters. A militia leader who withdrew his labour was brought back with money and status, which establishes the relationship for everything that follows. From that point Khartoum was not commanding a subordinate. It was retaining a supplier, and suppliers renegotiate.

In August 2013 the Rapid Support Forces were formed from the Janjaweed and placed under the National Intelligence and Security Service. The armed forces chief of staff had refused to take them, so they became a separate force reporting directly to the president.

In January 2017 the Rapid Support Forces Act nominally integrated the RSF into the armed forces structure while preserving its operational independence and direct reporting to the presidency. Hemedti retained full autonomy over recruitment, deployment and logistics.

That last clause is the whole thing. A statute created a regular armed force, parallel to the national army, whose commander controlled who joined it, where it went, and how it was supplied. Bashir’s purpose was a counterweight to the regular army, which is a rational autocrat’s calculation and which requires the counterweight to be genuinely independent to work.

He got what he asked for, which is the standing hazard in every sponsorship arrangement in this trade and the one sponsors consistently underprice.

The mine

Independence requires revenue, and in 2017 the RSF acquired some.

Hemedti’s forces took control of the Jebel Amer goldmines in North Darfur from Musa Hilal, the man he had replaced a decade earlier. Bashir allowed him to keep it. The United States Treasury later described the event in a sanctions designation as the RSF’s expropriation of the Jebel Amer gold mine, after which gold mining and export became a vital revenue source for the Dagalo family and the force.

Gold is close to an ideal commodity for this purpose. It is dense, valuable by weight, chemically stable, universally accepted, and once refined it carries no origin. A militia holding a producing mine has an income stream requiring no bank, no tax authority, no export licence and no customer relationship that anybody has to approve. Compare that with an oil field, which needs a pipeline, a terminal, a tanker and a buyer with a refinery, every one of which is a chokepoint somebody can close. Gold needs a bag and a flight.

Family-controlled companies flew gold bars worth millions to Dubai and later to Russia. The refining destination has its own chapter; what matters here is that the flights existed, and that they existed because the corridor was already running.

The second income stream

The other revenue source was the one that internationalised the organisation, and it was entirely lawful on its face.

From 2015 the RSF supplied fighters to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, with tens of thousands of Sudanese deploying over subsequent years. Those men were paid, and the payments went through the organisation.

That transaction changed the RSF’s character more than the gold did. Gold made Hemedti rich. Yemen made him a supplier to foreign governments, with a contractual relationship, a performance record, and counterparties in Gulf capitals who now had an interest in his organisation continuing to exist.

A militia with a mine is a wealthy militia. A militia with a mine and a foreign client is a company with a product line and a customer, and the customer is a state. That relationship also survives the sponsor it was built against: Khartoum’s leverage over the RSF declined in exact proportion to how much of the organisation’s income came from somewhere else.

By 2019 Hemedti was claiming to have donated a billion dollars to Sudan’s central bank, which is a militia commander recapitalising the treasury of the country he nominally served. Whether the figure is accurate matters less than that it was said in public and not contradicted.

A Global Witness analyst summarised the consequence in the plainest available terms: independent finances mean independent militias.

The corporate architecture

The structure that grew around the money is unusually well documented, because investigators, leaked accounts and sanctions designations have all described the same entities.

Al Junaid Multi Activities was the flagship, directed by Hemedti and his brother Abdul Rahim, with eleven subsidiaries. In 2017 the youngest brother, Algoney, established the GSK group in Khartoum, comprising a parent company, a construction arm, an IT arm and a medical arm, employing at one point between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people.

Algoney also established Tradive General Trading in the United Arab Emirates. Global Witness obtained information from the Dubai Department of Economic Development confirming him as a director and ultimate beneficial owner, found bank documents recording an eleven-million-dollar transfer from Tradive to an RSF account, and noted that one transfer’s stated purpose was described as a transfer to sister company.

In 2019 companies linked to the force bought a majority stake in Khartoum’s Al Khaleej Bank. A Dubai group called Capital Tap Holding operated with close links to the organisation.

Then, as international attention grew, the family stepped back from the paperwork. The Sentry has identified a small team of loyal lieutenants running the business empire in Dubai, with a leaked internal RSF accounting spreadsheet naming two of them, suggesting they had been part of the Dubai support team since at least 2019.

That is the free zone architecture described earlier in this subject being used exactly as designed: a family withdraws from directorships, nominees appear on the filings, the beneficial ownership register is not public, and the entities keep trading.

What the sanctions actually reached

The designation record is extensive and the pattern in it is the interesting part.

The United States sanctioned Al Junaid and Tradive in June 2023, the latter described as a front company controlled by an RSF major that imported vehicles on the force’s behalf. Algoney was designated separately as the RSF’s procurement director, for leading efforts to procure weapons and military materiel, having previously served as Hemedti’s personal secretary. Treasury noted Hemedti’s preference for staffing key roles with family members.

Al Khaleej Bank, GSK Advanced Business and the Capital Tap group were sanctioned, as was Hemedti himself, with the European Union and United Kingdom designating parts of the network. Three Dagalo brothers have been individually listed. The EU regime covers eighteen individuals and eight entities.

And then the replacement. Analysts mapping the network in 2026 identified a constellation of Dubai-registered firms mirroring Al Junaid’s business lines while distancing the family from direct ownership, with names including Al Jil Alqadem General Trading, Horizon Advanced Solutions and Natwest Logistics, declaring activities from gold and vehicle trading to consultancy and project management.

The observation to take from this is the one established in the free zone lecture and confirmed here at scale. Designating a company removes a name. A replacement costs a formation fee, and the assessment of what the sanctions accomplished is that the organisation was forced back to its core business of exporting gold from Darfur to Dubai.

Not stopped. Narrowed. The Sentry also documented a Dubai property portfolio linked to Hemedti, valued around 1.7 million dollars, situated near a military airbase.

The scale comparison

One benchmark puts the organisation in context and it is worth stating because it is easy to underestimate a militia.

Comparative assessments place the RSF’s estimated revenues among the wealthiest non-state armed groups in history, comparable to Islamic State at its 2014 to 2015 peak and exceeding Hezbollah.

The force claims a strength that has been reported at two hundred and eighty thousand in 2023 and as high as four hundred and fifty thousand more recently, which is a leader’s figure and should be treated as one.

Whatever the true number, this is an organisation with revenue in the hundreds of millions, an asset base around a billion, a corporate structure spanning multiple jurisdictions, a foreign client relationship, and a fighting force comparable to a mid-sized national army.

In 2025 it declared a parallel government. The militia-company completed the sequence by claiming to be a state.

The logistics dependency

Everything above depends on a physical fact, and it is the reason this belongs in a course about aircraft.

Darfur is landlocked, roadless across most of its extent, a thousand kilometres from any port, and adjacent to borders that are lines on a map. An organisation there can extract gold, and unless it can move the gold out and bring materiel in, extraction is worthless.

Gold goes out. The principal overland route has run from Jebel Amer through Chad to N’Djamena, and then by air to the Emirates, which is a truck leg followed by a flight leg, and the flight leg is the one that turns a commodity into money. A truckload of ore in Darfur is worth nothing until it reaches a refinery, and the refineries are in a Gulf state that can be reached by air in a few hours and by any other means in weeks.

Weapons and equipment come in, through the airfields the corridor serves, on aircraft chartered through companies registered somewhere convenient, which is the same architecture applied in reverse.

And fighters went out to Yemen, which required transport nobody in Darfur owned.

Remove the air link and the entire structure collapses into a regional militia with a mine it cannot monetise. The corporate architecture, the Dubai offices, the foreign clients and the parallel government all rest on the ability to fly things to and from a place with no other connection to the world.

That is the argument for why an air logistics subject spends time on a paramilitary holding company. The company exists because the flights exist.

Three ways to monetise a goldfield

The operational detail of how the money is actually extracted is worth setting out, because it explains why sanctions reach so little of it.

Analysts documenting the RSF economy describe three distinct modes. The first is direct mining through the family company, which is the visible one, the one with a corporate name, and the one a designation can touch. The second is a protection racket forcing artisanal miners to trade through the organisation’s channels, which produces revenue without the organisation mining anything. The third is individual units extracting and extorting at smaller scales on their own account.

Only the first mode has a balance sheet. The second and third are cash transactions between armed men and unarmed ones in places with no administration, and they generate no record anywhere.

The geography has also moved. Jebel Amer, the cornerstone of the original empire, was already declining before the war and has been further degraded by air strikes. The Songo mines in South Darfur became the primary production area, with the family company reported to have resumed operations there by late 2025.

Which is the durable feature of a resource-financed force. The company can be sanctioned, the mine can be bombed, and the revenue relocates, because what is being monetised is control of territory containing gold rather than any particular installation. A mine is an asset with a fixed address and armed control of a region is not.

The claims that do not hold up

An audit, since this organisation attracts both sanitisation and caricature.

The Janjaweed were disbanded is false, notwithstanding the Security Council resolutions demanding it. They were renamed, restructured, given statutory existence and a budget line.

The RSF is just the Janjaweed with a new name understates the change. The Janjaweed was a mobilised militia dependent on state supply. The RSF is a corporation with independent revenue, foreign contracts and a parallel administration, and that difference is the entire subject.

Hemedti is a Sudanese problem misses the Yemen contracts, the Dubai corporate network, the gold routed through the Emirates, and an International Court of Justice case filed by Sudan against the UAE in 2025 alleging complicity in genocide, which that state contests.

Sanctions have been ineffective is too strong. They removed named entities, complicated banking, and reportedly pushed the organisation back toward its core gold business.

Sanctions have worked is also wrong for the reasons above.

The UAE is the cause understates a structure that Khartoum built, that Bashir armed, that gold financed, and that had independent revenue before any Gulf relationship mattered.

Gold explains everything undersells the Yemen contracts and the statutory independence, without which the gold would have been seized by the state.

Hemedti built this alone ignores three brothers holding the directorships, the procurement function and the deputy command, in an organisation whose sanctions listings read like a family tree.

What Janjaweed Inc is actually telling us

The finding is about what happens to a proxy that becomes solvent.

Every sponsor in this subject wants the same thing: a capability it can use and disown. Achieving that requires the proxy to have an existence independent of the sponsor, because a force that is visibly funded, supplied and commanded by a state is that state’s force.

So independence is not a side effect of proxy warfare. It is the product being purchased, and it is purchased by giving the client resources, autonomy and a legal identity of its own.

Khartoum did all three deliberately. It gave the militia ranks and salaries in 2007, statutory existence and direct presidential reporting in 2013 and 2017, and a gold mine in the same period. Each step made the force more useful by making it less dependent, and the accumulated result was an organisation with more money than the treasury, its own foreign policy, its own logistics arrangements, and no reason to take orders.

In April 2023 it went to war with the army it had been created to counterbalance.

The pattern generalises past Sudan. A contractor industry built for somebody else’s wars, a state that rents its geography, an operator who starts as somebody’s airline: each begins as an instrument and acquires independent revenue, and once the revenue is independent the relationship inverts. The drone market runs the same way at the level of hardware: capability sold to a client becomes capability the client owns. The sponsor becomes a customer. The customer can be refused.

A company called The Soldiers, with eleven subsidiaries and a director who commands an army, is not a disguise. It is an accurate description of what a militia becomes when nobody stops it from having a balance sheet.