Although organized crime has been the neglected dimension of the conflict in Iraq, both criminal enterprises and criminal activities have had a profoundly debilitating impact. Organized crime inhibited reconstruction and development and became a major obstacle to state-building; the insurgency was strengthened and sustained by criminal activities; sectarian conflict was funded by criminal activities and motivated by the desire to control criminal markets; and more traditional criminal enterprises created pervasive insecurity through kidnapping and extortion. Organized crime also acted as an economic and political spoiler in an oil industry expected to be the dynamo for growth and reconstruction in post Ba'athist Iraq. The rise of organized crime in Iraq was a strategic surprise for decision-makers and military planners. Although organized crime developed in particularly concentrated and corrosive ways in Iraq, it had parallels elsewhere including the Balkans (especially Albania), as well as Russia, Mexico, and Nigeria. Warnings about the rise of organized crime came from several sources, including the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Organized crime in Iraq, as elsewhere, can be understood in two distinct forms: (1) as entities or criminal enterprises which treat crime in Clausewitzian terms as a continuation of business by other means; and (2) as a set of illicit activities appropriated and utilized by various entities for specific purposes. Terrorist organizations, insurgents, ethnic factions, sectarian groups, and militias all use organized crime activities as a funding mechanism. Not surprisingly, therefore, organized crime in Iraq challenges existing concepts and categorizations, casts doubt on strategies that focused narrowly on the military dimension of a complex problem, and demands new measures of effectiveness. If the conflict in Iraq is a hybrid or mosaic form of warfare, organized crime in Iraq has an analogous form, adding another dimension to the anti-coalition violence.