Some of the black market cigarettes available on Irish streets
Illegal counterfeit tobacco and smuggled cigarettes are funding ISIS and their brutal terror campaign.
The extremists are making as much as $1million a day, according to the United Nations.
And a French think tank, Terrorism Analysis Centre, claims that as much as 20 per cent of ISIS funding comes from cigarette smuggling and petty criminal activity in Europe.
They wouldn’t be the first terror group to use tobacco smuggling as a way to raise cash to pay guns, bombs and bullets.
The infamous Al-Qaeda chief in north Africa, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was also known as Mr Marlboro thanks to his smuggling operation.
His network was also used to traffic people oil and drugs.
Some of the illegal cigarettes that end up sold in Ireland will have been smuggled from the east by Chechen gangs who are sympathetic to ISIS, according to reports.
Ireland’s home-grown terror groups, including former IRA men, have been major players in the illegal trade in Ireland.
Between 1999 and 2004, the IRA are estimated to have raised €100million from tobacco smuggling.
Investigator and former senior Garda Kevin O’Donohue said that it is estimated that up to one in four cigarettes smoked in Ireland may have been smuggled.
“It’s hard to put a figure on what it’s worth in Ireland, but it’s a substantial sum of money, somewhere between €120m to €230m a year,” he told the Sunday World.
Retailers have claimed that as many as one billion illegal cigarettes are smoked in Ireland every year at a huge cost to the taxpayer.
The Terrorism Analysis Centre estimates that the global trade costs governments up to €60billion a year in lost tax revenue.
A big chunk of this cash goes to terror groups including ISIS, as well as other extremists such as Al Qaeda and Al-Nusra, which is based in Syria.
Other groups considered to be terror organisations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, have been found to be running fundraising smuggling operations in both
Europe and the United States.
Compared to drug smuggling, the risks for those involved when they get caught are much lower and the trade is sometimes not a priority for law enforcement agencies.
Some of the extremists involved in the recent Paris attacks by ISIS are known to have been involved in the trade in the city’s huge open-air markets.
Similarly, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers last January also had a criminal record and was involved in the illicit cigarette trade.
The illegal tobacco trade in France is one of the biggest in Europe.