The leaders of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) need money to pay their terrorist foot soldiers, to buy arms and ammunition and to sustain their pretend state with essentials such as foodstuffs and medicines.
The United Nations Security Council is moving to impose financial sanctions to cut off the terror group’s income, which is put at some $80 million a year. It is not clear that this is either practical or wise. It it not wise because it treats Daesh as a state much as Iran, which can be impoverished by a financial blockade. And it is not practical for the very reason that Daesh is not a state, but a criminal enterprise. It would be far better if the same measures that have targeted international crime syndicates, such as Colombian drugs barons and Mafia racketeers, were used against these gangsters, because that is very much what they are.
Their blasphemous claims to be conducting a jihad disguise the venal, self-serving motives of these ruthless killers, who rule the territory they have seized through cruelty and fear.
Allied airstrikes have focused on the oil production and the large income that the illegal sale is supposed to bring to the Daesh chiefs and their minions. Yet research published this week by the Financial Times in the UK, casts doubt on this assumed income stream. Even without the targeting of trucks carrying crude oil to customers in Turkey, it would seem that the available oil supply is largely needed to sustain Daesh terror operations. Crude refineries create diesel to fuel captured tanks and other military vehicles.
The terrorists seem to have helped fund themselves through plunder and robbery and via heavy taxes imposed on their captured populations in Syria and Iraq, particularly the city of Mosul. When Mosul was seized in June last year after the Iraqi army cut and ran, the terrorists laid their hands on $500 million in the local branch of the Central Bank of Iraq. Stolen household goods and vehicles are traded in Daesh-run bazaars. Despite their destruction of irreplaceable antiquities because they are deemed religiously offensive, these hypocrites are quite prepared to sell moveable antiquities to corrupt art dealers and collectors.
However, with the exception of the local taxes, the store of wealth that the terrorists have stolen is running out. Yet the costs of paying and feeding and arming the foot soldiers continue. With little opportunity for further conquest, the men of violence are running out of cash. If UN mandated financial sanctions can in fact actually impact any part of the terrorists’ current income, then Daesh’s difficulties will just get worse.
Yet there is one source of income which is being overlooked. The Assad regime has long had military and financial arrangements with the terror group it did so much to foster. Daesh-held utilities, such as power stations, still supply areas held by the regime - though not parts of the country controlled by the Free Syrian Army. The Damascus dictator pays Daesh for electricity and water and oil. It would seem clear, therefore, that the Assad regime must also be hit more severely with a clampdown on all foreign financial transactions.
