Iran’s economy is buckling. Under a US blockade, the Islamic Republic faces its most severe economic distress in years. For Hezbollah, which has long benefited from Iran’s expansive largesse, this begets a serious question: how to replace its financial patron. The terror group’s best option outside the Middle East is its West Africa network.

The United States is now in a global economic war with Iran and its proxies. It should use every economic tool at its disposal—diplomacy, technical assistance, and financial regulation—to squeeze Hezbollah and Iran.

Hezbollah has spent decades cultivating financial networks among the Lebanese diaspora in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. These are not peripheral operations. US authorities have identified Côte d’Ivoire’s roughly 100,000-strong Lebanese community as the primary conduit for Hezbollah money transfers in Africa. The mechanisms are well-documented: trade-based money laundering through used car exports, diamond smuggling, real estate, construction, organized crime, and drug smuggling. The money flows from Africa to Lebanon.

The Trump administration has rightly prioritized maximum pressure on Iran and its proxies. But that pressure campaign has a gap. The US government is not paying sufficient attention to West Africa—even as it may be increasingly important for Iran and Hezbollah. At the same time, there is an opportunity for the United States. West African countries want deeper relations with America on trade, security, and governance. The United States should use this appetite in West Africa for more engagement—along with talks with Lebanon—to shut down these networks now.

First, the United States should ramp up diplomatic pressure in the region. Côte d’Ivoire is currently under increased monitoring by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)—the global standard-setter for anti-money laundering. FATF identified several deficiencies in Côte d’Ivoire, including a lack of effective risk-based supervision, insufficient transparency in beneficial ownership information, and inadequate investigations and prosecutions related to money laundering and terrorist financing. The United States should make clear that Hezbollah’s financial facilitation is a priority, and that our support for delisting Côte d’Ivoire from FATF’s greylist is contingent on enhanced enforcement and writing sanctions on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah into local banking laws.

In Guinea, the US Treasury Department has documented Hezbollah financiers bribing officials and moving suitcases of cash through Conakry’s airports. That level of state facilitation warrants sustained diplomatic pressure beyond sanctions on bad actors. To do this effectively, the United States should ensure that it has an experienced and Senate-confirmed ambassador in place. Embassies across West Africa should also actively promote the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program, which currently offers up to $10 million for information leading to the disruption of Hezbollah’s financial networks. Lebanese business communities in these cities are precisely the environment where that kind of outreach—conducted discreetly through trusted local contacts—could generate actionable intelligence.

Second, the United States should deploy the Treasury’s Office of Technical Assistance (OTA) to build enforcement capacity. Many West African countries lack the institutional infrastructure to combat trade-based money laundering and terrorist financing—not because they’re unwilling, but because they are under-resourced. This is precisely what makes them such a valuable foothold for Hezbollah’s illicit fundraising.

Treasury’s OTA has a proven track record of helping partner nations strengthen financial intelligence units, customs enforcement, and legal frameworks for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT). An OTA resident advisor program in Côte d’Ivoire, focused on AML/CFT supervision and financial intelligence unit capacity, would close FATF compliance gaps while building the infrastructure to detect Hezbollah-linked trade-based money laundering. This is the kind of patient technical work that rarely makes headlines but compounds over time.

Third, there are opportunities to sharpen our regulatory tools. FinCEN’s October 2024 alert was a useful tool. A follow-on advisory that names specific high-risk jurisdictions—Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—and sectors such as artisanal gold would sharpen the effectiveness of compliance programs among US correspondent banks. Treasury should also consider broader use of Section 311 designations, which label specific institutions as “primary money laundering concerns” and cut them off from the US financial system. 

The Treasury has used this tool outside of Africa to devastating effect against Lebanese Canadian Bank in 2011 for its role in Hezbollah finance. Similar actions—or even the threat of such actions—against enabling banks, money service businesses, and exchange houses operating in West Africa would send a strong signal to global banks and West African governments that the United States is serious about crushing Hezbollah and Iran’s proxies.

We have an opportunity to get ahead of Hezbollah’s illicit finances now while Iran is economically weakened. Money from Iran once complemented diaspora remittances and criminal proceeds. Now, Hezbollah will likely need to rely increasingly on illicit flows from West Africa. That’s precisely when US efforts to curtail illicit finance matter most. Every dollar that doesn’t reach Beirut is a dollar that can’t pay a fighter, rebuild missile stocks, or bribe officials.