Wildlife Trade

Ivory’s Curse: The Militarization and Professionalization of Poaching in Africa (2014)

This report finds that significant criminal syndicates and organized terrorist gangs engage in elephant poaching to acquire ivory, which they sell to buy arms – and that political elites and state security forces are often complicit.

Main Findings:

• From Sudan, government-allied militias complicit in the Darfur genocide fund their operations by poaching elephants hundreds of miles outside North Sudan’s borders.
• In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, state security forces patronize the very rebels they are supposed to fight, providing them with weapons and support in exchange for ivory.
• Zimbabwean political elites, including those under international sanction, are seizing wildlife spaces that either are, or are likely to soon be, used as covers for poaching operations.
• In East Africa, al-Shabaab and Somali criminal networks are profiting off of Kenyan elephants killed by poachers using weapons leaked from local security forces.
• Mozambican organized crime has militarized and consolidated to the extent that it is willing to battle the South African army and well-trained ranger forces for rhino horn.
• In Gabon and the Republic of Congo, ill-regulated forest exploitation is bringing East Asian migrant laborers, and East Asian organized crime, into contact with Central Africa’s last elephants.
• In Tanzania, political elites have aided the industrial-scale depletion of East Africa’s largest elephant population.