Hezbollah foreign relations fashion of bin Laden, we do not endorse them. And many of the operations that they have carried out, we condemned them very clearly." Michel Samaha, Lebanon's former minister of information, has said that Hezbollah has been an important ally of the government in the war against terrorist groups, and described the "American attempt to link Hezbollah to al-Qaeda" to be "astonishing". As part of a surge of intersectarian support for Hezbollah during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's deputy leader, called for Muslims to rise up in a holy war against Zionists and join the fighting in Lebanon.
Funding of Hezbollah a military associate of Saddam Hussein. In 2011 the United States Treasury designated Lebanese Canadian Bank SAL a "primary money laundering concern" for its role in money laundering for Hezbollah funder and drug kingpin Ayman Joumaa. Operation Smokescreen identified an illegal multimillion-dollar cigarette smuggling fundraising operation in the United States. Mohammed Hammoud was convicted in the United States for "violating a ban on material support of groups designated as terrorist organizations". The amount was USD 3,500, which Hammoud claimed was to "support Hezbollah's efforts to distribute books at schools and improve public water systems." Hezbollah has also received Iranian-supplied weaponry,