US Treasury Sanctions Hezbollah Cash Network Run by Turkish Businessman
OFAC designates a courier ring moving hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah on commercial flights, and re-designates Hezbollah itself as an IRGC-controlled terrorist organization
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) - The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated 10 individuals on Wednesday, as members of a network responsible for transferring hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to Hezbollah through couriers traveling on commercial airline flights between Lebanon, Türkiye, the UAE, and Iran, simultaneously re-designating Hezbollah itself as an organization owned and directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.
The network, managed by Turkish businessman Yunus Alper Yilmaz, uses couriers carrying cash covertly on commercial flights to move funds outside the formal financial system, providing Hezbollah with foreign currency while evading existing sanctions architecture, the Treasury confirmed in an official statement on Wednesday.
Yilmaz manages the courier network responsible for moving cash between countries in the region and Hezbollah's base in Lebanon, abusing Türkiye-based exchange houses as fronts for his business dealings and providing front companies and bank accounts for money transfers connected with the IRGC Quds Force. His associates include couriers Halil Ibrahim Kacmaz and Onder Dede, who collect cash from the exchange houses, and Vasfi Akyuz, who coordinates logistics for the couriers and also participates as a courier himself. Additional couriers in the network, Mehmet Akyuz, Mehmet Acur, Feyyad Karasalih, Masoud Mousafar, Gulay Kaya Savci, and Emrah Ayaz, have covertly carried cash intended for Hezbollah on commercial flights to Lebanon.
Yilmaz, Kacmaz, and Dede were designated for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for the IRGC Quds Force. The remaining seven couriers were designated for providing equivalent support directly to Hezbollah.
The network was once associated with now-deceased IRGC Quds Force finance official Behnam Shahriyari and represents one example of the methods Iran uses to funnel support to terrorist proxy groups throughout the region, the Treasury said. Hezbollah and its allies exploit financing schemes including oil smuggling, illicit shipping, commodities sales, and bulk cash smuggling to generate and move funds across the region, with the courier network targeting exchange houses in Türkiye as a central node in the operation.
In addition to the 10 individual designations, OFAC re-designated Hezbollah itself as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, this time explicitly under the legal basis that it is owned, controlled, and directed by the IRGC Quds Force, reflecting the documented depth of Iran's command and control over the Lebanese organization. The US State Department had originally designated Hezbollah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in October 1997 and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in October 2001.
The action directly supports the broader Economic D-Day offensive that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared at dawn on Monday, August 24, 2026, in which he vowed to sever every economic lifeline sustaining the Islamic Republic and pledged that the financial offensive would constitute economic isolation the world has never seen before. The targeting of a Türkiye-based exchange house network and couriers operating through the UAE and Iran is precisely the type of shadow financial infrastructure Bessent and President Trump have publicly identified as a primary target of the incoming sanctions package.
All property and interests in property of the designated individuals that are in the United States or in the possession of US persons are now blocked and must be reported to OFAC. Non-US persons are also prohibited from engaging in transactions involving the designated individuals, with secondary sanctions exposure for foreign financial institutions that knowingly conduct significant transactions on their behalf.
Notably, the Turkish government has not issued any public response to the Treasury's designations as of Monday, despite the sanctions naming a Turkish national as the network's manager, identifying multiple Turkish citizens as couriers, and explicitly citing Türkiye-based exchange houses as the operation's central financial nodes. Ankara's silence is particularly significant given that the designations were published on the same day Trump warned that any country allowing its financial institutions to provide a lifeline to Iran would face "tremendous economic consequences," a warning that places Türkiye's financial sector under direct scrutiny at a moment when Washington is demanding full allied compliance with its Economic D-Day offensive against Tehran.