·
Oil
smuggling from controlled territories: . ISIS controls almost 60% of Syria’s oil, and
seven oil-producing assets in Iraq. Ιτ
exports about 9,000 barrels of oil per day at prices ranging from about $25-$45
(£15-£27). This revenue is ranged from $1 to $2 million a day, which makes oil its most
important source of income. Its main clients are Turkey, Iraq and Syria
·
Natural
resources exploitation: For instance, ISIS has seized control of three dams and two
gas-electricity plants in Syria. Rather than ruining them ISIS has made a deal
with Syria to let state employees come to work and sell some of the gas
produced to Damascus. Not only does the Assad government pay the gas plant
staff, but workers say it sends spare parts and specialists. Farmers of Raqqa's fields have accused IS of forcing
them to sell their commodities to Turkey while bread in Raqqa is scarce.
·
Taxes on the
population and local businesses in controlled areas for providing services such
as electricity and permissions to open new businesses/ VAT on products .
·
Kidnappings and
hostage taking: By 2014, ISIS kidnappings only in Mosul was generating $12
million per month. Averagely, ISIS gains almost $60 million dollars from
kidnappings.
·
Crimes such
as robberies, trade in illegal drugs and human trafficking: This levies around $80
million per month. One example is the June 11 seizure of Mosul's central bank,
which alone netted tens of millions of dollars to ISIS.
The donors from the Persian Gulf
As Former U.S. Navy Admiral and NATO Supreme Commander James Stavridis, put it to nbcnews.com "there are several Arab donators that are like what 'angel investors' are to tech start-ups, except they are interested in starting up groups who want to stir up hatred"[5].
It is no secret that the House of Saud promotes the extremist Wahhabism domestically, the question is whether it does so internationally too. Even though exact numbers are not known it is said that more than $100 billion (the number could be double) have been lavishly spent by Saudis on promoting Wahhabism to much poorer Muslim states[6]. It is noticeable that Soviet Union spent about $7 billion to promote communism from 1921 and 1991.
Last year, Vice President Biden at an event at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said[7] "Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The Turks were great friends... [and] the Saudis, the Emirates, etcetera. What were they doing?.... They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad -- except that the people who were being supplied, [they] were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis who were coming from other parts of the world".
After years of US pressure to Riyadh for it to designate ISIS as a terrorist organization not only until last March did it do so but still without achieving any particular objectives of obstructing private Saudi funding.
Qatar and United Arab Emirates are also accused for cloudy links to ISIS. Especially Qatar has been promoting diverse radical groups in order to strengthen its political position in the region. It has been even called by the US “permissive environment for financing terrorist groups”. Besides military-based funds, they fund charitable organizations for training imams, media, universities and cultural centers.
An important funding hub is also Kuwait. For the rest of
the Gulf states to ensure that their donations actually reach Syria, they send
their money to Kuwait. Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy, told
The Daily Beast. “Kuwait’s banking system and its
money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit
for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq[8].”
What should be remembered is that besides donations from
Gulf states which up until recently has been the major source of money for
ISIS, empower IS by maintaining trade relations. Selling crude oil to Turkey,
Iraq and Syria is a major resource for IS.
The role of the West
The promotion of
radical Islamism is not the only drive for the Gulf states that abet
ISIS. They also take pleasure in ISIS-led Sunni advances against Iraq's Shiite government
and in Shia containment (Iraq and Iran) in the region.
The same strategic interest is shared by the West. Years
after the Syrian rebellion the US and its allies have been supporting and
arming the opposition despite of its
ties to extremism. Besides wanting a buffer to weaken the Shia expansion it is
also in the best interest for US and its Western allies to get rid of Assad and
assure the flow of petrol through Syria. To cut a long story short, in 2011 a
$10 billion investment deal was signed between Iran, Iraq and Syria for a
pipeline to be built from Iran to Syria to transport Gulf oil to Turkey and
Europe[10].
A
recently declassified secret 2012 US intelligence report, allegedly reveals
that the Western countries, Gulf states and Turkey welcome the prospect of a "Salafist principality" in
Eastern Syria and an al-Qaida controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq[11].
Even though a report is not a clear and formal policy document it is indicative
of the mess brought into the region by the superficial game theoretic
approaches of Western states. Another
embarrassing example is when a trial in London of a Swedish man accused of
terrorism, was abandoned by prosecution after the defense threatened to reveal
plenty of evidence that the British state was providing support to extremist
Syrian opposition[12] .
Play with fire and you get burned! Ironically, there was no al-Qaida in Iraq
before the US-led invasion. And as if the West never learns little has it
achieved by the bombings of Syria according to locals, on the contrary they
have released the major extremist forces and allowed ISIS to overran almost
half of the Syrian territory.
Before 2001 the chunk of money directed to terrorists
were coming from businesses and institutions in the US. After 9/11 and the
implementation of the Patriot Act the money laundered for these purposes sifted
from the US to Europe that does not have a comprehensive anti-laundering legislation.
Thus, the US unsuccessfully managed to frieze only 200 million of terrorist
funds around the world while still huge amounts are routed through the US from
institutions and legal businesses. Yousaf al Salafi, commander of IS in
Pakistan stated that he run his organization with funding coming through the
US. He also admitted that he was getting around $600 per recruit sent to Syria[13].
The US Western allies are not less involved in the
funding process. In Europe banks are still free to do business with shadowy
financial entities. In the Milan mosque in Via Quaranta case, for example,
Italian authorities discovered that the cell received funds from Arab sponsors
via British offshore accounts.[14]
Last but not least, few Western oil businesses are
accused for doing business with ISIS. For example, the British oil company,
Genel Energy, which is contracted with the Kurdish Regional Government is
accused of facilitating ISIS oil sales to Turkey.[15]
By Elpiniki Karakosta
[1] Available at Available at http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/14/how-does-isis-fund-its-reign-terror-282607.html
[3] After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, al Zarqawi set up the
forerunner to today’s Islamic State: Jama’at al-Tawhid w’al-Jihad (the Party of
Monotheism and Jihad), which was made up mostly of non-Iraqis. By 2011, when
the U.S. troop withdrawal was complete, Al Qaeda was being run by Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, and had morphed from a largely foreign to a largely Iraqi
operation. AQI was now better known as the Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI.
Baghdadi took Zarqawi’s tactics and supercharged them. Available at
https://www.quora.com/How-did-ISIS-form-When-and-where-did-ISIS-begin.
[4] Available at
http://www.businessinsider.com/theory-that-saudi-arabia-funds-isis-2014-6?IR=T,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b2c6b5ca-9427-11e4-82c7-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz3s4gTSMse and
http://egyptianstreets.com/2015/05/11/what-keeps-isis-running-the-funding-and-support-of-a-terror-organization/
. Also see Costigan, Sean S., and Gold, David, eds. Terrornomics. Abingdon,
Oxon, GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 November
2015
[6] Available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-yousaf-butt-/saudi-wahhabism-islam-terrorism_b_6501916.html
[7] Ibid
[10] Available at http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903591104576467631289250392
[11] Available at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq
[12] Available at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq
[13] Ibid
[14] See Costigan, Sean S., and Gold, David, eds. Terrornomics.
Abingdon, Oxon, GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15
November 2015.
[15] Available at https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/britain-s-secret-ties-to-governments-firms-facilitating-isis-oil-sales-210d21470e65#.paji5uhpn
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