Yves here. The prevalence and effectiveness of rebel groups and their external backers is not terrain I know well, so I very much encourage reader commentary on John Ruehl’s observation. I am old enough to remember Peru’s feared Sendero Luminoso in its heyday. My understanding is gangs have long exerted considerable control in Colombia. In Japan, the yakuza even have a quasi official role. They are allowed to run prostitution and gambling rackets with the deal being that they keep hard drugs out of Japan. I have no idea if that pact still holds but I understood it was well settled when I worked with the Japanese (1980s, with continuing gossip into the 1990s).
That is not to say that things have changed, but what, exactly? Greater effectiveness of these actors due to the democratization of warfare via drones and other cheap and highly effective weaponry? Even more failed states due to US nation-breaking, creating power vacuums and warlord-ism? Major powers tacitly supporting this instability to facilitate resource grabs (particularly in Africa), which more cohesive states could successfully oppose or at least curb?
By John P. Ruehl, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, DC, and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Follow him on X @john_ruehl. Produced byEconomy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
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Yemen’s civil war reignited in early October, as Saudi Arabia brought in Turkish and Pakistani military support to fight the Houthi rebels, who have governed much of northern Yemen as a de facto authority and waged a guerrilla war in the country since 2004. Having spent more than a decade fighting Saudi-led forces and enduring US, British, and Israeli strikes, the Houthis have survived as a powerful regional force with close ties to Iran. Their continued ability to threaten Yemen’s neighbors and Red Sea shipping was demonstrated again by retaliatory strikes against Saudi infrastructure in recent days.
Although Iran is its main state ally, the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, are far from isolated. A spokesperson for the US military’s Africa Command said in September that the growing cooperation between the Houthis and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Somali Islamist group Al-Shabaab was a “highly concerning, escalatory threat to regional stability,” according to the Financial Times. Contact between the two ideologically opposed groups—Houthis are Zaydi Shiites, and Al-Shabaab has been strongly ideologically opposed to Shiism—has been publicly evident since at least 2024, with the Houthis supplying weapons and technical training to Al-Shabaab, which, in return, has been providing access to piracy smuggling routes along the Somali coast.
In recent years, similar ties have emerged between the Houthis and other non-state groups in Somalia. The Islamic State in Somalia (ISS) has received Houthi weapons and drones while helping them monitor ships in the Gulf of Aden. The Houthis, Al-Shabaab, and ISS have also coordinated with Somali pirates to transport goods and target vessels in the Red Sea. “During the Gaza conflict, Ansar Allah persuaded Al-Shabaab, ISS, and Somali pirates to attack vessels and block their passage into the Red Sea in solidarity with the Palestinians,” stated a 2025 article in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Since 2022, the Houthis have meanwhile paused fighting with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) amid the Yemeni civil war. According to the think tank Jamestown, this collaboration is transactional and focused on short-term arrangements: the Houthis can acquire funds and smuggling routes, and Al Qaeda affiliates can procure weapons and manufacturing capabilities.
Along with the Houthis’ decades-long relationship with the Lebanese-based force Hezbollah, which also has the backing of Iran, the group has more partners than its isolated diplomatic standing suggests.
Foreign state support remains crucial to non-state groups. Much has been made of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” but British support for the Arab Revolt during World War I demonstrated how Western powers could use local armed groups to shape Middle Eastern affairs. The US and Soviet Union refined proxy warfare during the Cold War, covertly financing, training, and arming foreign militant movements, from the US-backed Nicaraguan Contras to Soviet support for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). This helped push militant groups into the drug trade, with the superpowers willing to turn a blind eye when criminal profits helped keep their allies fighting.
Supporting non-state groups also provided smaller states with means to strike at more powerful adversaries. Between the 1970s and 1980s, Libya supplied the Irish Republican Army with weapons, explosives, and funding to attack British targets.
The partial decline in state support immediately after the Cold War forced many non-state militant groups to become self-reliant. Globalization, along with improved communications and financial networks, brought them into increasing contact with organized criminal organizations, even as state support rebounded.
Together, the “crime-terror nexus” has built a global black market of smuggling routes, safe houses, arms dealers, financiers, money launderers, and shared technology. Distinguishing lines have faded—militant groups like the Houthis have turned to drug smuggling to fund their operations, Yemeni authorities alleged, according to reporting by the nonprofit Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Somali pirates have also become more militarized due to their cooperation with the Houthis. Alliances between non-state groups are mostly loose and temporary partnerships, and even groups like Al Qaeda have become decentralized, giving local affiliates greater freedom to pursue their own interests.
From Al Qaeda’s role in 9/11 to the Red Sea crisis involving the Houthis and their allies, these non-state groups have shown they can reshape global affairs independent of state sponsors. The global illicit economy generated around $6 trillion in 2025, according to the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies, giving criminal and militant networks growing reach across international trade and finance. Governments and businesses also have to contend with these groups moving through the formal economy; in 2023, Gulf-based traders were sanctioned for brokering charcoal exports from Al-Shabaab-controlled territory.
As the global order grows more unstable due to ongoing wars, cooperation among non-state groups makes it harder for governments to control them and for the private sector to avoid them.
Pursuing Instability
Africa has experienced this phenomenon most severely. Since the 2023 outbreak of Sudan’s civil war, largely between the Sudanese Armed Forces and rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an estimated 150 groups have taken part in fighting. Competition for territory and Red Sea access, alongside political influence and control over the illicit gold trade, has attracted tribal militias, Islamic groups, foreign mercenaries, and criminal groups into the conflict.
These actors have typically alternated between the two main warring sides based on their own financial and political interests. Cooperation between traders, smugglers, and armed groups helps keep gold and weapons moving across borders, with “[t]he growing incentivization of armed actors toward revenue capture and other criminal activities… deepening self-perpetuating drivers of the conflict,” according to the Africa Center.
Outside powers have similarly sought to secure influence over Sudan, often leaning on private forces and intermediaries. At various times, for example, the RSF received support from Russian private military companies (PMCs) backed by the UAE, UAE-linked Colombian PMCs, and aircraft operated by a US contractor supporting RSF logistics, according to a Reuters investigation. But shifting local alliances have frustrated foreign attempts to control the conflict, forcing them to continually adjust their own relationships as the balance of power changes.
Nonetheless, the UAE’s position as the world’s second-largest gold exporter, bolstered by Sudan’s huge gold reserves, suggests that the benefits of the conflict may outweigh the incentive to end it. As a Brookings article states, “the UAE has been the major buyer of Sudan’s gold, which many observers believe is the ‘lifeblood’ of the civil war.”
A recent setback for non-state groups in Africa came in Mali, where government forces, backed by Russian government-controlled Africa Corps, retook the city of Kidal in October 2026. The city was seized in April—alongside additional Malian territory—by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an Al Qaeda-affiliated coalition, in coordination with the secular Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a secular Tuareg separatist coalition. The FLA controlled Kidal for years before Malian and Russian forces retook it in 2023.
The October offensive in Mali was welcomed in Niger and Burkina Faso. In the 2020s, the three countries removed their elected leaders through military coups. The military juntas that followed strengthened cooperation with Russia and promised to defeat insurgencies and increase domestic ownership of resources. They have extracted substantial payments from Western mining companies and increased state control over the mining sector. But JNIM, FLA, and other groups still operate across significant territory, and the frequent changes in control in Kidal show how unsettled the conflict remains.
JNIM’s regional agenda is meanwhile aided by drug and human trafficking networks, with the group providing security and safe haven to smugglers in exchange for a share of their income. Additionally, despite the global rivalry between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, their Sahelian affiliates JNIM and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara initially cooperated against Western and regional forces, before turning to the conflict in the region.
These groups have withstood or emerged despite the combined efforts of the French-led counterterrorism mission Operation Barkhane, UN peacekeeping efforts, and actions by foreign powers-backed PMCs since the early 2010s. They may also outlast the latest Russia-backed effort to defeat them, particularly if they continue to expand ties regionally and globally.
Washington Weighs Its Options
Washington is navigating this expanding web of non-state actors with few effective options. In Sudan, Washington has pressed the Sudanese Armed Forces “to sign an unconditional ceasefire that would freeze the conflict and allow unimpeded access for critical aid deliveries,” according to Al Jazeera, but has failed to secure an agreement. Over the summer, the Trump administration meanwhile considered strikes in Mali to target non-state actors, but their spread across the Sahel would require a wider campaign. The limited effectiveness of the 2025 US strikes in Nigeria to attack camps of an armed group affiliated with the Islamic State, Lakurawa, highlights the difficulties in containing these groups through airstrikes alone.
The Trump administration is seeking to stabilize relations between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, while formalizing mineral supply chains and securing US access to minerals under the Washington Accords. But armed groups like M23, which control the mines, work together with mineral smugglers to connect resources to international buyers, complicating any efforts to build a secure supply chain.
Foreign companies, meanwhile, continue to act as eager buyers from these networks. A 2025 Global Witness investigation revealed that Luxembourg-based commodities trader Traxys purchased conflict coltan smuggled from DRC to Rwanda, while another 2026 report by the nonprofit found that smuggled coltan also found its way “into global markets and popular consumer products, despite due diligence systems.”
For now, Washington may have to tolerate these networks, as its focus on reasserting dominance over the Americas is challenged by a range of militant and criminal organizations operating there. In 2025, the administration designated dozens of criminal groups in Latin America as foreign terrorist organizations, and has carried out lethal strikes through Operation Southern Spear on suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.
Yet, besides controversy surrounding the operation’s legal basis and civilian deaths, the strikes are “badly mismatched to the nature of its target. Drug trafficking organizations are decentralized criminal networks that absorb enforcement pressure by rerouting shipments, replacing personnel, and splintering into smaller groups, states the John Quincy Adams Society.
Latin American militant groups have long crossed paths with more general criminal organizations. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had longstanding ties to drug traffickers, with a 2015 InSight Crime report alleging that FARC members trained fighters from Mexico’s Jalisco cartel. Comandos de La Frontera (CDF), which includes dissident factions of the now-defunct FARC, reportedly works with the Ecuadorian gang Los Lobos, moving drugs from Colombia toward the Ecuadorian coast while also dealing with weapons, ammunition, and stolen gasoline, Diálogo Américas reports.
Hezbollah-linked criminal and financial networks have also been reported across Latin America for decades. A Colombian intelligence report mentioned by El Heraldo in 2025 alleged links between Hezbollah, Venezuela’s Cartel de LOS Soles, ELN, and FARC splinter factions cooperating for drug trafficking and money laundering activities, through a network allegedly based in Dubai and operating via shell companies in Qatar.
In 2025, the Trump administration offered up to $10 million for information on Hezbollah’s financial institutions in the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, a longstanding hub for smuggling and money laundering that operates with support from regional criminal networks.
The enormous investments involved in organized crime networks have created global economic connections, with Chinese underground banking networks helping Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel move drug proceeds across borders, according to a report by AI investigations company TRM Labs.
The military threat has also evolved as militant groups and organized crime networks overlap, with cartels now operating “more like insurgent groups than purely criminal organizations, employing tactics such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), drones, and the recruitment of foreign mercenaries,” according to the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy.
State policies can also enable these groups to become more lethal. Los Zetas emerged from a Mexican special forces unit whose members received US training, before becoming the armed wing of the Gulf cartel. The Zetas eventually became a powerful independent organization, helping it establish links with Hezbollah-linked networks. Hezbollah has also sought to exploit domestic criminal networks, with American authorities documenting its efforts to use local criminal groups to support operations within the US.
A New Normal
These networks may be based where government control is weak, but their global reach makes them a challenge for all states. The Sinaloa cartel has extended its drug trafficking routes into Africa, crossing jihadist-controlled territory, and has been working with European criminal networks to distribute the substances to European markets. Revenue from these activities can then finance weapons, recruitment, and further operations for all actors. While non-state groups often engage in violent competition with one another, their ability to work together has made even bitter rivals useful partners when interests align.
Al Qaeda’s persistence despite decades of US pressure demonstrates the resilience of these groups. Though the Houthis’ future remains uncertain amid a widening Saudi-led military campaign backed by Turkey and Pakistan and talk of renewed US strikes, the coalition assembled against them reflects how influential they have become, partly through assistance from their non-state partners.
The Taliban likewise returned to power after near-defeat in 2021, becoming Afghanistan’s de facto government despite limited international recognition. Its successful insurgency benefitted from ties to drug traffickers connected to regional and international criminal networks, as documented by researcher Hamid Azizi in his 2024 article.
While Washington’s focus returns to its great power competition amid war with Iran, the Russia-Ukraine War, and competition with China, it cannot ignore the underworld actors that are thriving through opportunistic cooperation. Their supply chains have become so developed that states rely on them to sustain their economies, with the Kinahan cartel’s reported involvement in Russian oil shipments helping keep Russia’s sanctioned economy afloat.
The role of non-state groups in fragile regions complicates traditional mediation efforts, as key actors involved in unrest and conflict are often no longer governments, “but profit-driven corporations and armed factions operating outside the bounds of state control,” states the think tank Foreign Policy in Focus. As non-state groups and commercial interests forge cross-border ties that bypass governments, states are increasingly losing their role as primary architects of the global order, as businesses work with whichever actors can secure their interests.