Originally Posted by
ORAC
The only thing of value that the Syrian government earned foreign currency from was oil. And ISIS hold all of them ... There is always a buyer, and a lot of the air effort is going into shutting down the export routes - not with a great deal of excess.
Did you mean "not with a great deal of success?"
The size of the group’s bank account has now risen to an estimated $2 billion dollars, thanks in part to revenues from ransom paid for kidnapped foreigners and more pillaging. However, oil remains the group’s primary source of income.
The oil part of it should be traceable.
The 11 oil fields that IS controls in Iraq and Syria have made it a largely
independent financial machine.
Only if they can keep getting it to market and keep production running. Identify, publicly out, and apply pressure to the customers of this illicit oil trade ... hmmm, good luck with that, as I recall Saddam getting around the oil export embargo without that much trouble during the 90's, albeit at reduced volumes.
Reports show that IS-controlled fields in Iraq produce between 25,000 and 40,000
barrels of oil per day, at an estimated value of approximately $1.2 million, before being smuggled out to Iran, Kurdistan, Turkey and Syria.
But it has to be refined. IS that not a logistic choke point that can be exploited?
What’s more, now that it controls fertile provinces in western Iraq, such as Anbar and Nineveh, the group also now sits on 40 percent of Iraq’s wheat crop, and can force farmers to deal only with them, sometimes for no pay......
A non trivial problem, to be sure.
Questions:
- How does Syrian government retake the Deir Al Zour region?
- How do they keep it?
For that matter
- How does Mosul get retaken in Iraq?
- Who runs it?
Answering those four questions seems to be the first answer to getting Daesh out of their position. Note, it took just over a year of fighting to get ISIS/Daesh out of Baiji.
On 23 October {2015} Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi visited the city of Baiji,
declaring that Baiji was finally free from ISIL militants, and that the anti-ISIL forces had won a "valuable victory." Al-Abadi also stated that the battle proved the capabilities of the Iraqi forces, and a Shi'ite commander stated that his forces were removing the IEDs and landmines left behind by ISIL in the city.