Treasury sanctions Yunus Alper Yilmaz at center of Hezbollah courier network

Treasury also re-designates Hezbollah as ‘specially designated global terrorist’

The US Treasury Department on Thursday announced sanctions against 10 people it said operated a courier network that smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, by carrying the funds onboard commercial airline flights between Iran, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said the network obtained foreign currency for Hezbollah outside the formal banking system and helped the group evade US sanctions. The department linked the operation to a scheme once associated with Behnam Shahriyari, a now-deceased finance official for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.

At the center of the network, according to OFAC, is Yunus Alper Yilmaz, a Turkish businessman accused of running the courier operation. The department said Yilmaz used Turkish-based currency exchange houses as fronts, along with shell companies and bank accounts tied to the Quds Force. Two men accused of collecting cash from the exchange houses on Yilmaz’s behalf — Halil Ibrahim Kacmaz and Onder Dede — were designated, as was Vasfi Akyuz, whom OFAC described as a logistics coordinator who also worked as a courier.

Six others — Mehmet Akyuz, Mehmet Acur, Feyyad Karasalih, Masoud Mousafar, Gulay Kaya Savci and Emrah Ayaz — are accused of physically carrying the cash to Lebanon on commercial flights. None of the 10 appear to be public or widely known figures.

Separately, OFAC re-designated Hezbollah as a “specially designated global terrorist,” citing what the Treasury Department described as the Quds Force’s coordination of Hezbollah attacks and its deep involvement in shaping the group’s political decisions.

A State Department spokesperson, Tommy Pigott, tied the courier action to Washington’s broader campaign against Tehran. “The network uses couriers traveling on commercial airline flights between Lebanon, Turkey, the UAE and Iran to move hundreds of millions of dollars, enabling the regime to obtain foreign currency illicitly, evade sanctions and fund Hezbollah,” Pigott said. He added that the investigation leading to the sanctions was carried out in coordination with Turkish authorities, and said the US would continue targeting networks that finance Hezbollah’s activities against Lebanon’s sovereignty and regional security.

The action lands amid a sharp rise in tensions between Turkey and Israel this week, after Israeli airstrikes on a Syrian airbase near Aleppo prompted Ankara to accuse Israel of using the incident as a pretext to violate Syrian sovereignty. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Turkey against expanding its military footprint in Syria.

Under the sanctions, any assets the 10 individuals hold in the United States or under the control of US persons are frozen, and Americans are generally barred from doing business with them.