Episode 353: Terrorism Rewired: AI, Crime-Terror Networks and the New Global Threat Landscape with Dr Colin P. Clarke
In this episode, we host Dr Colin P. Clarke to explore how terrorism is evolving in an era of AI, organised crime, proxy warfare, and great power competition. Drawing on decades of work on terrorism, insurgency, illicit finance, and political violence, Dr Clarke explains why today’s threat landscape is no longer defined solely by hierarchical jihadist organisations, but by decentralised networks, regional affiliates, lone actors, criminal ecosystems, and state-backed proxies. He also reflects on how groups such as ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, and far-right movements adapt to new technologies, exploit geopolitical crises, and sustain themselves through propaganda, illicit finance, and transnational support networks.
We discuss why terrorism today is more fragmented, more hybrid, and harder to categorise than many older counterterrorism models suggest. From ISIS’s evolution into a franchise-like movement and Hezbollah’s diversified funding streams to AI-enabled propaganda, drones, virtual currencies, Russian hybrid warfare, Wagner, and the possibility of terrorism triggering wider interstate conflict, this conversation offers a timely guide to how political violence is mutating – and why policymakers must avoid treating terrorism, organised crime, and great power competition as separate problems.
Dr Colin P. Clarke is the Executive Director of The Soufan Center and one of the leading analysts working at the intersection of terrorism, insurgency, organised crime, and geopolitics. He is the author of several books, including Terrorism, Inc. and After the Caliphate, and writes widely on terrorist financing, the crime-terror nexus, ISIS, Hezbollah, proxy warfare, and emerging security threats. His work has appeared in outlets including Foreign Policy and War on the Rocks, and he regularly contributes to public debate on terrorism, political violence, and international security.
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Transcript
[00:00:01] Colin Clarke: The more you can offload working on propaganda to AI and other kinds of machine learning technologies, the more time you have to focus on attack planning. It is simply delegation that frees you up to do the more lethal parts of being a terrorist. Terrorists, we usually say, are one or two steps ahead. My concern is this is allowing them to get four or five steps ahead.
[00:00:23] Dominic Bowen: Welcome back to The International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.
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[00:01:29] Dominic Bowen: Terrorism today is blending into organised crime, proxy warfare, illicit finance, and even geopolitical competition. It is decentralising, and it has embedded itself in criminal systems, which makes it much harder to track, to disrupt, and ultimately to defeat. I’m Dominic Bowen and I’m host of The International Risk Podcast, where we go beyond the headlines and examine the forces that really matter when it comes to shaping international risk. Today’s guest is Dr Colin Clarke. He is the Executive Director of The Soufan Center, and he is one of the sharpest analysts working at that intersection of terrorism, insurgency, criminal networks, and geopolitics.
[00:02:04] Dominic Bowen: From ISIS and Hamas to Hezbollah and far-right extremism and the crime-terror nexus, his work really helps us understand how political violence is mutating and what that means for the global threat landscape today. Dr Colin Clarke, welcome to The International Risk Podcast.
[00:02:20] Colin Clarke: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:02:21] Dominic Bowen: Whereabouts in the world do we find you today, Colin?
[00:02:23] Colin Clarke: I’m talking to you today from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
[00:02:26] Dominic Bowen: Very cool. Nice. Well, thanks for taking the time today, Colin. I think back, and I’m showing my age a little bit here, but I remember when I was a very junior officer in the military, one night getting woken up, I think it was one or two o’clock in the morning, by my colleagues who at that time, being young officers, had a habit of being quite violent towards other young officers. I was being woken up at two in the morning to come to the TV room, which of course I refused to do, and then eventually realised it was something serious. I walked into the TV room just as the second jet was flying into the World Trade Center.
[00:02:56] Dominic Bowen: Of course our world, working for the government, just changed completely overnight. Since then I have worked for quite a few different government agencies and, ultimately, all of it has been funded and pushed by the global war on terror and what followed after that. But terrorism is not the same as it was in 2000, let alone what it was like in 2005. Can you maybe talk us through how you have seen terrorism evolve over the last couple of decades to where we are today?
[00:03:21] Colin Clarke: Sure. Again, thanks for having me. I remember that day very well. It changed the trajectory of my life and my career. I was a college senior studying abroad in Galway, Ireland, at the time.
[00:03:32] Colin Clarke: I grew up in New York, so this was personal to me. I was actually in Ireland studying terrorism and political violence. This was three years after the Good Friday Agreement, so I was there to look at the aftermath and the mechanisms of how things got to that negotiation stage. But after 9/11 I became obsessed with Salafi jihadism and al-Qaeda and Pakistan, and really trying to understand what was going on there. I’m from a military family, a lot of Marines, and so I knew that my family was about to deploy.
[00:04:03] Colin Clarke: They were asking me questions about what was going on over there, and frankly I didn’t know. I felt naïve, and that drove my desire to really study this problem set, which I have been doing every day since. If you look at 9/11 and you look at where the terrorism threat landscape is today, I would say the attack surface has broadened significantly. For a good chunk of the so-called GWOT, the global war on terrorism, putting aside the name, which I think is terrible because we declared war on a tactic, but that is something we like to do in the United States: war on poverty, war on crime, war on drugs, which I think we lost, war on gluten, or whatever other nefarious things are out there lurking to harm us.
[00:04:44] Colin Clarke: But today, in 2026, I would say the threat is probably more diverse than ever. This is something Bruce Hoffman and I wrote about several years ago. We called the threat kaleidoscopic in nature. It was broadening. It was not just Sunni jihadists; there were all these other threats manifesting as well.
[00:05:00] Colin Clarke: I think we see that very well today: Sunni jihadists, Shia extremists, far right, far left, technophobes, which are people that are averse to the creeping ubiquity of technology and artificial intelligence, so they are kind of pushing back against that. There are any number of things that could motivate violent extremists today. More than ever, we really have to be a jack of all trades rather than specialising in one kind of narrow field of political violence.
[00:05:29] Dominic Bowen: Thanks for mentioning that. And thanks very much for the service of your family, and no doubt the sacrifices that you and they made in service of that. I think anyone who has served in the Marines and had a family that served has made sacrifices, whether you deployed yourself or not. But thank you very much for their service. And we know Bruce Hoffman well.
[00:05:47] Dominic Bowen: I remember reading his books when I was in Iraq. I was studying remotely whilst deployed to Iraq and read his books, and it was a real pleasure. We had him on the podcast back in episode 182 about far-right terrorism in America. Bruce Hoffman had published some work on that. So, fantastic scholar and author, and a real thinker about terrorism.
[00:06:03] Dominic Bowen: But you have certainly written a lot yourself. You have some great books, and we will link to those below for anyone who is interested in looking at them and hopefully purchasing them. You wrote more recently that in 2025 terrorism means something very different now. I really like that wording because that is actually something I have been saying a lot. In 2025 I was saying to a lot of business leaders that the landscape we are operating in is so different today from what it ever has been.
[00:06:27] Dominic Bowen: What I have been saying for Q1 of 2026 to business leaders is that 2026 is not the same as 2025 either. We are evolving at such a speed and with such dramatic changes. But what did you specifically mean when you said that terrorism means something different now?
[00:06:43] Colin Clarke: Well, you alluded to it. You talked about the speed of change and how quickly things are changing. Terrorism is a microcosm of broader society, and the same changes we see in society, we will see terrorists take advantage of too. Technology is driving a lot of this.
[00:07:00] Colin Clarke: If you think about various forms of emerging tech, you have unmanned aerial systems, or drones, including commercial off-the-shelf drones or hobby drones, which anyone can get their hands on. They are cheap, they are plentiful, they are not very difficult to learn. There are all sorts of ways that if you really wanted to become handy and an expert in using these things, you could do it legally. There are message boards online where you can go and talk about the ins and outs with other people about how these things work. I flipped on ESPN the other day to watch college basketball and there was drone racing on.
[00:07:35] Colin Clarke: I do not think it is quite a sport, but the fact that it has become so prevalent in society, and the ease with which you can master these things and then direct them towards more pernicious ends, makes it seemingly easy to do. The barrier to entry to master these technologies has been lowered significantly. I will list a few others: 3D printing or additive manufacturing, printing weapons, printing the things that you would need; artificial intelligence, obviously; ChatGPT, Claude, ways to think through attack planning.
[00:08:05] Colin Clarke: We have seen AI used in a number of terror attacks so far for planning purposes. Encrypted communications, virtual currencies. These are all kinds of emerging technologies that violent extremists can harness and leverage to commit attacks. So that is changing quite a bit in 2026, and it is changing rapidly.
[00:08:23] Dominic Bowen: Thanks for that. Another area that I find quite interesting is that, at least ostensibly, many extremist groups claim to be motivated by religion and a higher cause, and something that seems quite noble, although of course it has taken an extreme form. But at the same time we have seen these same terrorist groups increasingly resemble businesses in how they generate revenue through criminal activities like drug trafficking, extortion, and organised crime in order to sustain their operations. I understand that from a business point of view, but when their motivation is ostensibly to create a better world, a world that accords with the rules of their prophet and their gods, I cannot help but think there is some significant confusion there.
[00:09:08] Dominic Bowen: We have certainly seen that with groups in many different areas. Can you talk to us about that, and how these groups justify actions which most of us would see as probably not consistent with either the Qur’an or the Bible or any other holy texts, and yet it is what funds their operations?
[00:09:24] Colin Clarke: Really good points. You are not the first person to point out these inconsistencies. The first book that I wrote, Terrorism, Inc., looked at how a range of terrorist groups funded their organisations, both their organisational capabilities and operational capabilities. One of the groups I looked at was the Taliban.
[00:09:42] Colin Clarke: This is a group that is very religiously austere, follows Deobandi Islam, and has all these strictures for what people can and cannot do. Yet this was a group that also sold drugs and engaged in opium trafficking, which would be counter to a lot of Islamic religious principles. But it also shows that these groups are pragmatic. They are religious when they have to be, and they are selling drugs when they need to fund their organisation. We could get into a number of other things that I think are also un-Islamic, including some of the practices that take place in that country between the Taliban and little boys, but we could leave that for another episode.
[00:10:20] Colin Clarke: The crime-terror nexus is not new necessarily. This is something that evolves. And to my previous point on emerging technologies, tech is opening up new avenues for this. If you look at Islamic State Khorasan Province, which for my money is one of the biggest threats to the West, you are looking at a group that has that intersection of intent and capability to launch external operations, but they are also using Monero and other virtual currencies to raise money.
[00:10:49] Colin Clarke: The crime-terror nexus is a topic I am really passionate about. I wrote a piece in Foreign Policy last year with my colleague Clara Broekaert where we looked at ways that Hezbollah engages in the crime-terror nexus. That is something that is probably going to change going forward, because of the extent to which the Iranians have been battered. They are not going to be able to provide the same level of funding to Hezbollah, which according to the US government and open source reporting at one point was up to $700 million a year. That is not something you replace easily.
[00:11:21] Colin Clarke: Hezbollah does have a diversified criminal portfolio that stretches from Latin America to West Africa and beyond. These guys have their fingers in everything: drugs, used cars, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, you name it. But I think the group that probably tapped into the crime-terror nexus most efficiently was Islamic State at its peak, in 2015 and 2016. They did a really good job of deliberately recruiting people with known criminal backgrounds.
[00:11:50] Colin Clarke: They even put together what I thought was, from a marketing and advertising standpoint, an impressive recruiting campaign where they were putting out posters online essentially saying, “Those people with the worst past sometimes have the best futures.” It was a redemption narrative for people who had spent time in jail, where they had radicalised and become receptive to these ideas, saying, “Come purify yourself.”
[00:12:03] Colin Clarke: What did Islamic State get when they brought in these kinds of criminals from Brussels and Paris and all of these European cities? They got Westerners, they got people who knew how to find safe houses, the logistics of crime that also work well for terrorism, and they found willing recruits. These were also the same individuals who went back to conduct the Bataclan attack in November 2015 and the Brussels bombings in March 2016. So it was really useful from a recruiting standpoint, and a lot of that usefulness was situated in the crime-terror nexus.
[00:12:50] Dominic Bowen: What is your opinion, Colin? I hope this is not an unfair question, but I am going to ask it anyway. I work a lot in high-risk situations and I have for the last 20 years. I was in Damascus two weeks ago, I will be back in Ukraine next week, and I always ask myself, trying to be a little more mature than I was in my twenties, is it worth it? Is this mission worth it? Is the risk I am going to face worth it?
[00:13:08] Dominic Bowen: I certainly know that back in 2014 and 2015, when we were working in Syria, I had half my team kidnapped when I was working with Médecins Sans Frontières. You have to look at the risks, and I know that the programmes, the issues, and the things we are doing really justify the risk, but honestly sometimes you have to say: getting my head cut off because I believe in Jesus Christ by someone who says he goes for a different religion, when the day before he was raping girls and young boys, you sort of go, something is not right here. This equation does not add up.
[00:13:26] Dominic Bowen: So my question to you, Colin, is: do a lot of the groups that call themselves Islamic extremists actually believe in Islam, or is this more about being part of a family and a community, as opposed to actually believing in the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad?
[00:13:53] Colin Clarke: I think it is hard to say. It depends on the individual, and painting with a broad brush is difficult. It is also not my place to say who is a real Muslim and who is not. But I will say that, from my understanding, the ideology that groups like ISIS follow is a perversion of the religion they claim to represent.
[00:14:02] Colin Clarke: They always conveniently allow for things that they want to do anyway. Like many religions, a lot of this is a cover for power and access to power and manipulation, and it is very cultish behaviour, where you see these groups establish the in-group, the out-group, and the others. It is absolutely a perversion of the religion. It is a very fundamentalist interpretation, and there are aspects of terrorism and political violence built into that.
[00:14:32] Colin Clarke: They can say, “Well, I can do this because of X,” or “I can sell drugs because the apostates are consuming them.” There is always this convenient loophole or caveat or fatwa. As somebody who is what my mum would probably call a buffet Catholic — I will take this, I will leave that — I am familiar with the picking and choosing, but I am also not on a worldwide quest for domination.
[00:14:59] Dominic Bowen: That is fair enough. You mentioned Islamic State. Their territorial defeat — and let us not forget that at one point they controlled, I think, half of Syria and a third of Iraq — was massive. But ultimately they were defeated, and it has led to this decentralised terrorist diaspora with cells conducting these low-level attacks globally, rather than the large-scale conquests we saw about a decade ago. You did quite a bit of work on ISIS around that time. What did analysts get right, and what did we get wrong, when it comes to what this post-caliphate threat would look like?
[00:15:33] Colin Clarke: That is a really good question. It is one I have obviously thought a lot about. I published a book in 2019 called After the Caliphate: The Future of the Islamic State and the Terrorist Diaspora. At that time I was seeing this group coming to an end from a physical, territorial standpoint. You are right: at one point they controlled territory equivalent to the size of Great Britain.
[00:15:53] Colin Clarke: This was a group that recruited tens of thousands of foreigners from across the world, from 80 different countries, to come join it. So it was highly effective from a recruiting standpoint. It is hard to say what people got right and what people got wrong, because a lot of people are now weighing in with their opinions. I will tell you what I think the United States got wrong about this.
[00:16:10] Colin Clarke: You have heard President Trump say on numerous occasions that the Islamic State has been defeated. I think because we were able to remove that final piece of territory around Baghouz in the spring of 2019, we kind of washed our hands and said, “All right, that is done, let’s move on.” But if you look at how the group decentralised and spread globally throughout sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia, any serious counterterrorism analyst would tell you this group is far from defeated. To think otherwise is naïve and frankly just wrong.
[00:16:41] Colin Clarke: It was very knowable that this group would shift to a franchise-based model and would seek to incite homegrown violent extremists from Montreal to Melbourne and everywhere in between. What has changed is the priorities for Western governments. Frankly, the threat level has always ebbed and flowed.
[00:17:04] Colin Clarke: I will give you an example. After the Bondi attack in Sydney in December, which was horrible, I was asked to come on television and interviewed by all these media outlets. The underlying premise was: “Is ISIS back?” That fundamentally misunderstands that this group never went away in the first place. For me, in the counterterrorism community, it is like: no shit. They did not go anywhere. We know that.
[00:17:25] Colin Clarke: But it speaks to our attention span, to what the bright shiny object is. For people in this field, we knew the group never went away. There was the attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day here in the United States a few years ago. If you actually look at arrests, there are a lot of disrupted plots and people who are still very much attempting to carry the name of this group forward. Hell, we had two last month. We had an Islamic State-inspired attack in New York City and another one at Old Dominion University. So if the group is dead, how is it still managing to incite homegrown violent extremists throughout the world?
[00:18:10] Colin Clarke: That is something that has bothered me because our attention has shifted to great-power competition. We are distracted now by five million things. I am not going to sit here and say I think terrorism is an existential issue. I do not. It is just what I have chosen to dedicate my life to. I think the pacing threat for the United States is the rise of China. No doubt it makes sense to shift resources to think about that.
[00:18:26] Colin Clarke: However, what we have done is throw the baby out with the bathwater. We have said we have moved on from this threat, it is no longer an issue, we have to worry about Gaza and Ukraine and Greenland, whatever other dumb shit we are looking at in the moment. Coming off the global war on terrorism, there was always bound to be a correction, and I think that was the right thing, because we overcommitted resources because the threat was so severe. 9/11 was such a shock to the system that we put everything we had towards that threat, and we did a damn good job at slowly working through it.
[00:19:07] Colin Clarke: So there was always going to be this natural correction or deviation back towards the mean. But we have overcorrected. We have taken our counterterrorism resources, personnel, and funding, and put them in all these other baskets. Now we are left at home. If you want to get into some of the current news cycle, there was news just yesterday that the Trump White House is organising a summit on Antifa in the summer. Look, I am not going to downplay that left-wing violence is a real thing. It is. I have no ideological agenda, I do not give a shit.
[00:19:32] Colin Clarke: But what they are doing is letting politics dictate the threat landscape when it should be intelligence. I think that is a grave error. We still have not seen a counterterrorism strategy from this administration, even though last summer we were promised one was imminent. It is a really frustrating time to be in the counterterrorism community and to see a very serious threat landscape put against governments that do not seem like they are taking it seriously, or want to play politics with it, which is frankly just dumb and dangerous.
[00:20:01] Dominic Bowen: I think if we could convince all politicians to use risk-based and intelligence-based approaches, we would be in a very different position. But alas, we are where we are. When we look at ISIS, and I want to come back to extreme left and extreme right, I just want to finish the conversation around ISIS and some of the regional affiliates like ISIS Khorasan, as well as this hybrid model of lone wolves. How concerned should we be about that threat? Germany has had repeated ramming attacks, so has the UK, Sweden has had a couple of terrorist attacks, and I think there have been 20 terrorist plots foiled recently in the UK alone. MI5 has been very vocal on that topic.
[00:20:42] Dominic Bowen: How concerned should we be, as citizens, business leaders, and academics, about the actual threat from groups like ISIS right now?
[00:20:49] Colin Clarke: Look, I do not think we need to cower in our homes. The threat ebbs and flows and does so in response to a number of factors and variables, including the geopolitical context. With the Iran war, we are in a heightened threat environment. We just are. That comes from Shia extremists, including people inspired by Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, but it also comes from Sunni jihadists too.
[00:21:04] Colin Clarke: Let me explain that a little bit. There is no love lost between Islamic State supporters, al-Qaeda supporters, and Iran. That is a Shia country. That is the ultimate apostate. However, war and conflict make for strange bedfellows. The Iranians have provided sanctuary and safe haven to Saif al-Adel and other al-Qaeda leaders for a very long time. Why? Because it is convenient.
[00:21:34] Colin Clarke: Despite the ideological difference, we saw this after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. The Islamic State has long castigated Hamas for being apostates because they stood for elections. They do not like Hamas. They do not think Hamas is the real deal. They are not extreme enough. If you can square that — ISIS saying you are not extreme enough to the group that went in and did what they did in southern Israel — they still benefit from these conflicts because, in their mind, a rising tide lifts all boats.
[00:22:04] Colin Clarke: If there is worldwide anger over Gaza, they are going to tap into that. They are going to frame their propaganda to get people fired up and push them over that line from “I’m really angry about this” to “I’m going to go do something about it in the real world.” That is very much a dynamic at play, and it is something we are going to see right now with the conflict in Iran. This is going to have long-lasting reverberations. It is not something that is going to peter out soon.
[00:22:30] Colin Clarke: Again, it ebbs and flows. You mentioned a couple of ISIS affiliates. My advice is the same as it has always been: if you see something, say something. Be aware of your surroundings, but do not change your daily life because of this. We should have faith in policymakers and intelligence agencies to do the right thing — I say that realising I am obviously being critical of what is happening in the United States.
[00:22:42] Colin Clarke: These are groups that are highly capable and determined to attack the West. That includes not just ISIS-K, which is at the very top of that list, but ISIS in Somalia and Islamic State affiliates in the Sahel, which could have connections to the diaspora in Europe. My colleague Lucas Weber just wrote a really fantastic piece in Foreign Policy on that issue. So, range of threats: take it seriously, but you do not have to go hide in your basement.
[00:23:16] Dominic Bowen: You mentioned left-wing extremism. My understanding from the latest data is that left-wing extremists are traditionally much less lethal and have a much lower base in terms of actual incidents, but that is increasing, whereas right-wing extremists come from a higher base, but statistically that is decreasing. One of the things you mentioned, Bondi in Australia as well: one of the things the Australian Prime Minister was criticised for mercilessly over was that after the attack he refused to call it Islamic terrorism. He said the threat came from left-wing and right-wing and other forms of terrorism.
[00:23:46] Dominic Bowen: Everyone was just sort of going, hold on — where are the left-wing terrorists in Australia? Where are the right-wing terrorists in Australia? Why will you not just call this what it was? How should we look at the difference between the various types of terrorists and terrorist groups? Are they all equal, or does it require some nuance?
[00:24:03] Colin Clarke: Great question. I do not want to comment on what the Prime Minister of Australia’s motivation was. Some people tiptoe on this line. He is a politician, so he has different motivations. My advice would be: call it like you see it. It does not sound like he did there, whether because he was attempting to be too politically correct or whatever advice he was getting at the time.
[00:24:30] Colin Clarke: If we have a jihadi attack, there is nothing wrong with saying it was a jihadi attack if we have evidence pointing towards that. If you do not, you lose credibility. It makes people think you are playing politics and have ulterior motives. You are right: traditionally left-wing terrorism, depending on the period you are looking at, has been less lethal. It has been more about property destruction, vandalism, and lower-level issues.
[00:24:47] Colin Clarke: At various points we have had groups like the Earth Liberation Front and other eco, environmental, and animal-rights groups that have been drawn to terrorism and violence. I think — and I have been predicting this for years — that we are going to see a spike in left-wing violence and terrorism, and we have. Some of that is called reciprocal radicalisation. When you have the rise of the far right, you are going to have an answer on the left, and then an answer to that. We are going to ping-pong back and forth here.
[00:25:09] Colin Clarke: There was a plot disrupted in the United States by the Turtle Island Liberation Front. We have seen an interesting melding of left-wing college students and pro-Hezbollah, pro-Hamas types. That gives me big Weather Underground vibes, and Baader-Meinhof, and some of those older left-wing groups from the 1970s. But the data shows that far-right groups have traditionally been far more lethal. They are more organised. Typically the body count is much higher.
[00:25:35] Colin Clarke: I am speaking to you today from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the Tree of Life attack happened. There have been other attacks like El Paso and many others where the body count is just higher. The problem in the United States, and you may have this in other countries, is it gets tribal. The debate becomes “the left is not as dangerous as the right”, or vice versa, and it becomes almost an identity thing with politics.
[00:25:54] Colin Clarke: Again, I am not a political person. I do not care where it is coming from. I want to identify it and figure out ways to stop it. But you also have to understand it and what is motivating it, whether it is localised or global. Too often we get really wrapped up in what the politics of this mean and people start getting defensive. I think we should be agnostic about the ideology. We should be looking at the threat and understanding how we counter it.
[00:26:25] Dominic Bowen: All right, thanks for explaining that. I will just take a moment, Colin, to remind our listeners that if you like to watch your podcasts, The International Risk Podcast is always available on YouTube. So please go to YouTube and search for The International Risk Podcast, and if you like it, please subscribe and like our content, and maybe even share it with a friend. This really is important for our success.
[00:26:52] Dominic Bowen: Now, Colin, your work on Hezbollah’s funding argues that the group survives through diversification, but it also includes criminal enterprise. Venezuela, if we all look back to January, might have been forgotten after everything that has happened since then, but it has long been identified as a transit hub for cocaine coming out of Colombia. There have long been reports highlighting links between the Maduro regime and cartels, as well as Hezbollah operatives involved in drug trafficking and money laundering. No doubt we will see some of that come out in Maduro’s trial in New York.
[00:27:29] Dominic Bowen: Now we are seeing, and I am quoting the Israeli Minister of Defence and the Israeli Finance Minister, what they have described as deliberately disproportionate attacks by Israel against Shia communities in Lebanon. Even the Lebanese government has banned Hezbollah, yet they still remain. What does this tell us about the resilience of organisations like Hezbollah and how they manage to endure such significant pressure?
[00:27:40] Colin Clarke: I think Hezbollah is fairly unique when it comes to terrorist organisations. Even after 9/11, folks in the US government said that on the grand scale al-Qaeda is the B team and Hezbollah is the A team.
[00:27:52] Colin Clarke: This is a group that emerged in the early 1980s, was responsible for attacking the United States, and is an Iranian proxy. It received a boost after the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982. They stayed for 18 years, until 2000. This group really framed itself as the resistance. It was the bulwark and the only group standing up to the Israeli occupation. It is part of Lebanon’s socio-political and economic fabric now, which is why the Israelis are finding it so difficult to dislodge the group.
[00:28:22] Colin Clarke: We can get into all the clichés and truisms of “are we killing more terrorists than we are creating?” After the pager attack in September 2024, which was kind of ripped out of Hollywood, that operation took out some important cadres within the group’s middle tier and middle leadership. But look, this is a group that recruits people from a young age. Everyone that lives in these Hezbollah strongholds supports the group, even if they do not always agree with its actions.
[00:28:44] Colin Clarke: So disarming the group seems almost impossible. I just do not think it is a group you are ever going to be able to fully eradicate, given its popularity in Lebanon, how long it has been around, and its longstanding funding pipelines, which we have talked about. I think it is going to capitalise on what is perceived as, again, the Israelis being in Lebanon now. Have they learned from their mistakes? This can be a slippery slope that leads to mission creep.
[00:29:10] Colin Clarke: The longer the Israelis stay in southern Lebanon, the more they are actually breathing life back into this group because they are giving people a reason to join, a reason to resist. I think it is ultimately going to prove counterproductive and quite myopic on Israel’s part.
[00:29:36] Dominic Bowen: For those listeners who do not remember the pager attack, it was in mid-September 2024 when pagers exploded simultaneously after receiving a coded message. This was an Israeli operation. Twelve people were killed, sadly, including two children, and about 3,000 people were injured with hand, face, and eye wounds because of the blasts. Then the next day there was another blast involving, I think, walkie-talkies, and another 20 deaths and about 450 injuries.
[00:30:02] Dominic Bowen: So in total there were about 39 people killed and over three and a half thousand wounded from these attacks. Incredibly complex planning and operations, and multiple companies purchased by Israeli security and intelligence services in order to carry out this attack. But as you said, sometimes you have to look at how many terrorists we kill versus how many terrorists we create. Looking a little further south, if we look at Hamas, despite the phenomenal levels of destruction across Palestine, Hamas seems still to be in place. How does that occur?
[00:30:39] Colin Clarke: Counterterrorism cannot just be purely kinetic. People join terrorist groups because of grievances, and those grievances can be diverse. But when you assume a scorched-earth approach and a completely draconian counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaign, there was zero effort to win hearts and minds. Absolutely none. There was no attempt to do it.
[00:30:58] Colin Clarke: Unless you literally kill every person there — which is not feasible, nor advisable, nor moral, ethical, or legal — you are going to end up with some proportion of that population that then rejoins Hamas, or joins Hamas, or actually gravitates to a more hardline group. Believe it or not, you can actually get more hardline than Hamas. You can join a Salafi-jihadi group with an ideology more similar to the Islamic State.
[00:31:27] Colin Clarke: Again, the Israelis live in a tough neighbourhood, but a lot of the actions they are taking are ultimately going to come back to haunt them. One thing I have questioned throughout this campaign is whether these are actions designed to help one individual, namely Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the expense of what is likely going to be decades of anti-Semitism that flow from this. People conflate Jews everywhere with the actions of Israel, which I do not think is right, but we have seen it time and time again.
[00:31:54] Colin Clarke: I think what Netanyahu has done over the last several years in the Middle East will prove to be really, really counterproductive for Jews worldwide. At the same time, it is not guaranteed to make Israel any safer.
[00:32:07] Dominic Bowen: I think that is a very relevant point. When we look at the 9/11 bombers and the heinous attacks they carried out, and what some of their motivations were, certainly there were wars that had been occurring for the decades before that which motivated them. No matter how moderate you are or where you sit on the political spectrum, it was impossible not to see children and women with horrific injuries, or killed, after the attacks in Gaza.
[00:32:42] Dominic Bowen: Of course Israel had a right to defend itself — I am not disputing that for a moment — but some of the images coming out of Palestine made it hard to imagine that some people would not become radicalised. Good, normal people would become radicalised after seeing some of that. I know you have spoken and written a lot about the information warfare and propaganda advantages that some of these groups have. What should we be looking at today when it comes to that? Iran is a great example. There has been some — I want to use the word brilliant, but I do not want to make it sound like it is a good thing — some very clever propaganda coming out of Iran.
[00:33:04] Colin Clarke: Be honest, man. Some of these things have been funny as fuck.
[00:33:07] Dominic Bowen: Thank you. I will let you say that. From a political perspective, what are the propaganda advantages these groups have today, whether we are looking at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, some of their proxies, Hezbollah, or Hamas?
[00:33:22] Colin Clarke: These groups have a global following and they are adept at using technology. I will give you an example from Islamic State. I wrote a piece with Charlie Winter, who is an expert on ISIS propaganda, for a publication called War on the Rocks. I do not remember what year that was, maybe 2017. What we were studying was how the Islamic State deliberately recruited people with backgrounds in marketing, PR, and communications, and actually enticed them to join the group by saying, “We will give you this title of emir, or this housing allotment, or this number of sex slaves.”
[00:33:58] Colin Clarke: Do not forget, they used Yazidi sex slaves as war booty to entice commanders. They deliberately recruited people with backgrounds they knew would be helpful for the information warfare strategy. It showed, because everybody said, “Wow, this stuff is really slick. It is really sophisticated.” It was segmented almost in the way a Madison Avenue advertising firm would segment its campaigns.
[00:34:21] Colin Clarke: The message they sent to recruit a 40-year-old Uyghur from western China was not the same as the message they sent to a 22-year-old petty thief from Molenbeek in Brussels. They knew that. They knew how to appeal to different groups, and they knew what themes resonated. From that standpoint, it was impressive. I never want to compliment the group, but if we are simply assessing it objectively, it was very effective in what it did. They understood their target audience, they put together these campaigns, and they worked quite well.
[00:35:06] Colin Clarke: Today, again going back to emerging tech, because that is a through line running through a lot of these conversations, they are experimenting with AI. They are using AI to help translate their propaganda into different languages. They are using it to spread reach and resonance. The more you can offload working on propaganda to AI and other kinds of machine learning technologies, the more time you have to focus on attack planning. It is simply delegation that frees you up to do the more lethal parts of being a terrorist. That should be concerning to everybody.
[00:35:28] Colin Clarke: The learning curve is not great. We are seeing these groups improve over time. I have written about this with Tech Against Terrorism, which is a really great non-profit based in the UK that looks at how terrorists use technologies. They have written a lot about this and are analysing it. It is a really fascinating subset of terrorism studies that is moving incredibly fast. The change is rapid, it is dizzying, and terrorists, we usually say, are one or two steps ahead. My concern is that this is allowing them to get four or five steps ahead.
[00:35:57] Dominic Bowen: Really interesting. Thanks for explaining that. Another theme that we know and have all seen, and certainly for those of us who have had the blessing of working in these countries, is that in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and obviously Iran, there is a significant overlap between state and non-state actors and the threats that come from them. I know you have been working on Russian-based actors from the Wagner Group. Can you tell us a little bit about counterterrorism and great-power competition? You mentioned China before, but of course I have just mentioned Russia as well. Is there an overlap we need to be considering when it comes to terrorism and state forces?
[00:36:34] Colin Clarke: Great question. I would urge anyone listening to go look at our new report that we just put out at The Soufan Center on Russian hybrid warfare. We looked at how the Russians conduct hybrid tactics in six countries: the UK, France, Germany, Moldova, Georgia, and Estonia. Go look at how the Russians act in these countries.
[00:36:59] Colin Clarke: Some of these incidents I would categorise more as traditional acts of terrorism. Frankly, we do not call it that because there is a political element here and there are other things at play. But if you actually look at the tactics themselves, they very much reek of terrorism and not some other cute name we come up with to avoid dealing with the Russians head-on.
[00:37:18] Colin Clarke: I think we have shifted a lot of resources away from counterterrorism to great-power competition because we fundamentally misunderstand what great-power competition is. When we take assets out of the Sahel and out of Central Asia to say we are focusing on GPC, great-power competition, we are failing to understand that those are the regions where this is actually occurring.
[00:37:35] Colin Clarke: I think the Russians get that. That is why they bring the Wagner Group, or Africa Corps, into theatre. We have a book coming out — myself, Chris Faulkner, and Raphael Parens — on the Wagner Group called Moscow’s Mercenaries, which will be out in two months through Columbia University Press. We have looked closely at this group for years and how it operates. Frankly, I think we are going to see other countries emulate that. The Chinese are already using private security firms throughout Africa, not in the same way that the Russians do, but they are using them. The Turks do. I would expect other countries to follow suit.
[00:38:21] Colin Clarke: I think it is so difficult to disaggregate counterterrorism from great-power competition. Often these are artificial creations and walls we build up to separate one from the other, but there is actually a lot more overlap if we are able to look into these things and attempt to disaggregate them.
[00:38:27] Dominic Bowen: Thanks. We will link to that report. For anyone who has been listening and found even just some of what we have discussed today slightly interesting, do have a look at The Soufan Center website. I promise you will be geeking out over many of the maps, whether it is the Strait of Hormuz, the weapons being used, US bases in the region, or the analysis about Russia and the Wagner Group. There is so much on that website. You really will find plenty there to read.
[00:38:50] Dominic Bowen: But Colin, just as we wrap up, one question that I ask all guests who come on The International Risk Podcast is: when you look around the world, what are the international risks that actually concern you the most?
[00:39:03] Colin Clarke: Go back to something you said earlier, which is: how is terrorism different today? I wrote a piece in Foreign Policy with Chris Costa, who is a retired colonel and a counterterrorism legend in the United States for everything he has done. He was also President Trump’s counterterrorism adviser during the first Trump administration, so someone I highly respect. He is a lifelong practitioner, but he also has a very sharp mind on this.
[00:39:29] Colin Clarke: We wrote a piece for Foreign Policy. One of the risks we pointed out was that as people move their attention away from terrorism and towards great-power competition and nuclear proliferation, there is a lack of appreciation that terrorism itself can cause those things. If you look at the attack in Kashmir last year, I believe it was last April, about a year ago, when you have jihadi groups launching attacks in Indian- or Pakistani-administered Kashmir, you are bringing two nuclear-powered countries to the brink of conflict.
[00:40:04] Colin Clarke: Go back to how the First World War started. It was actually a terrorist attack that triggered it, that catalysed it. The stakes are much different now with nuclear powers. If you have groups acting as a kind of tripwire to bring about interstate war — war between two nation states, conventional military conflict with nuclear weapons — that to me is a microcosm of how we tend to underestimate the power of terrorism.
[00:40:29] Colin Clarke: 9/11 was a terrorist attack that essentially led to two decades of US involvement in the Middle East. I am not saying Iraq was connected to 9/11 at all. We made that conflation. That was something the United States created. However, it still provided fodder for those who wanted to embark on regime-change wars, which I would point out have not really worked out well anywhere we have conducted them, whether in Iraq, Libya, or now Iran.
[00:40:56] Dominic Bowen: Thanks for taking us on that tour of the world, and thanks for explaining that. Most importantly, thanks very much for your time and for coming on the podcast today.
[00:41:02] Colin Clarke: I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. I had a lot of fun.
[00:41:05] Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a really great conversation with Dr Colin Clarke. He is the Executive Director of The Soufan Center, and I really appreciated hearing Colin’s insights about terrorism, how it is evolving, the proxy groups involved, criminal networks, and how these links between terrorism, organised crime, and geopolitics are all merging together. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Edward Penrose. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening.
[00:41:27] Dominic Bowen: We will speak again in the next couple of days.
[00:41:30] Dominic Bowen: Thank you for listening to this episode of The International Risk Podcast. For more episodes and articles, visit The International Risk Podcast. Follow us on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Instagram for the latest updates and to ask your questions to our host, Dominic Bowen. See you next time.
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