Drugs

Because of the potential for high profits, terrorist groups and criminal networks are increasingly involved in drug smuggling.

Drug smugglers often use a portion of their profits to intimidate or corrupt government officials and jeopardize a country's future. Criminal gangs and "drug wars" create insecurity in a society. The carnage and violence that follows is gruesome - charred bodies, beheadings, and torture are often displayed to intimidate government officials and citizens alike.

Weapons

Terrorists and criminal organizations alike arm themselves within a country by smuggling weapons, ammunition, and explosives. In addition, weapons are often smuggled as a means of making profits by selling them to rebel and other criminal groups within a country.

Illegal weapons impact a country by providing arms to criminal, terrorist, and rebel groups. This, in turn, leads to sharp increases in crime and political upheaval which destabilize legitimate governments and erode individual citizens' rights.

Human Transportation

Human smuggling is a crime involving the transport of a person, with their consent, to another country through illegal means. Relying on immigrants' hopes to find better lives, human smugglers force them to pay exorbitant fees for their crossing, often through violence and abuse. Due to the huge potential profits involved, the flow of immigrants across international borders is increasingly controlled by terrorist groups and criminal networks.

Human transportation networks are linked to other transnational crimes, including drug and weapons smuggling. These networks move criminals, fugitives, terrorists, trafficking victims, and migrants across borders.

Human Transportation

Human transporting comes in two forms: human trafficking and human smuggling.

Human trafficking is the acquisition of people, usually women and children, by force, fraud, or deception with the aim of exploiting them. Human traffickers regard people as commodities - items that can be exploited and traded for profit. This exploitation is highly lucrative from organized criminal groups. Practically every country in the world is affected by human trafficking - as a point of origin, transit, or destination.

Cultural Property

Cultural objects, such as antiquities (unearthed ancient objects), often provide lucrative profit opportunities for terrorist and other criminal groups. In fact, Interpol estimates that the antiquities trade ranks behind only drugs and weapons in its scale of illegal trafficking.

Archaeological artifacts and antiquities are a significant part of a culture's common heritage and often provides important testimony of a culture's development and identity. Not only does the illegal trade of these artifacts fund criminal and terrorist groups, it robs whole cultures of any evidence of their history, heritage, and identity.

Natural Resources

Natural resources such as timber, gold, diamonds, other minerals, and even wildlife is often smuggled out of countries rich in these resources and illegally sold for profits to finance terrorism, criminal networks, and armed rebel groups that destabilize legitimate governments.

Not only do terrorist and criminal groups benefit from the illegal smuggling and sale of natural resources, but individual countries are prevented from using their own natural resources for legitimate economic growth and development.

Counterfeit Pharmaceuticals

Terrorist and criminal groups have recently discovered the profit potential of manufacturing and selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Much like illicit drugs, such as cocaine, counterfeit pharmaceuticals have a lucrative profit potential; however, they often present lower risk of detection and prosecution.

Counterfeit medicines further sicken ill patients, can cause death, and contribute to the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria strains.