WHY U.S. 'Antique' Market Funds Global Terror
 

Traditional assessments of the global illicit ivory trade radically underestimate its economic scale. Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) cartels have advanced in power over the last decade thanks to state corruption, armed conflict, terrorism, and those willing to buy what they sell: weapons, narcotics, ivory — and people. According to a 2026 report by the Institute for International Political Studies, ivory traffickers and terrorist cells frequently exist side-by-side. They share the same morally bankrupt middlemen, cross-border smuggling routes, and underground financial remittance networks along the East African coast and beyond. Terrorists sell or trade raw elephant ivory for weapons. Meanwhile, Transnational Organized Crime syndicates rely entirely on the unmonitored "antique" market to launder illicit ivory into the U.S. domestic economy and elsewhere. Trafficking networks utilize this market as a mechanism for High-Value Storage. 

​By converting poached ivory into unique, decorative artifacts, they create an elite, untraceable physical currency that completely evades the global banking system and anti-money-laundering (AML) monitoring. What is driving the imminent extinction of elephants on the face of the earth? Nefarious buyers and sellers at the crux of an elite, multi-billion-dollar financial system. Syndicates slaughter elephant herds to harvest their tusk-based 'currency' and immediately terrorize adjacent local villages to secure trafficking routes. This "horror show" has been linked directly to Al-Shabaab, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Janjaweed, and Boko Haram, who operate alongside international operatives targeting African elephant populations during militant operations with advanced technology and complex infrastructure support.

Elephants are a species at the brink. Conservationists and intelligence experts have been warning America, and the world, that elephants are an endangered keystone species, encouraging people to act now to stop their imminent extinction. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, elephants are being killed faster than they are giving birth. This spells extinction. In 1800, an estimated 26 million elephants roamed Africa. Over 25 million elephants have been eradicated since then to feed human consumption for ivory products, representing an over 99% loss in the population of African elephants on earth. While baseline data was historically inflated by compromised organizations to mask the acceleration of the crisis, definitive 2014 research from Princeton University exposed the stark reality: fewer than an estimated 240,000 African elephants remained. This century, 55% of savanna elephants were exterminated in a single decade, and forest elephants suffered an estimated population decrease far worse, up to 90%.

Can America finally abolish the ivory trade by closing deceptive "mammoth" and "antique" loopholes that favor ivory objects over endangered species? In 2026, it is either the end of the ivory trade, or the end of the elephants. We appeal to the President to stop the ivory trade in America as a strict National Security imperative via Executive Order.