The Islamic State raises millions of dollars a week ...
... from "taxation" and outright extortion of businesses and local government and civilian workers, according to Howard Shatz, a senior economist at the Rand Corp. "ISIS raises much of its money just as a well-organized criminal gang would do; it smuggles, it extorts, it skims, it fences, it kidnaps and it shakes down," he wrote in a blog post.
Last year, ISIS raised ~ $20 million from kidnapping alone, according to US Treasury Department. (Not sure how they figured this out ...)
- As of last year, ISIS controlled as much as 350,000 barrels per day production capacity in Iraq and Syria, but was only able to produce 50,000 to 60,000 barrels a day, according to estimates from IHS.
- The oil is sold on the black market, mostly via trucks smuggling it over the border to Turkey, a route first established more than a decade ago by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who used the black market to evade sanctions on oil sales.
- That supply chain, created to evade the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, still provides a ready market for oil and diesel fuel produced at facilities seized by ISIS.
- The group has set up what amounts to its own oil company, recruiting trained engineers and managers through a human resources department and offering competitive salaries; some formerly worked at the oilfields now under ISIS control, according to the Financial Times.
ISIS made more smuggling oil than first estimated.
(Bullet points, summary from the source)
- ... the amount of money ISIS can earn from selling and smuggling oil and gas is roughly to $8 to $10 million a month.
- Oil smuggling, much of it to Turkey, is a key source of income for ISIS.
- The group uses the money in part to pay its fighters monthly salaries and provide stipends to their families. Foreign fighters (highest paid)earn up to $1,000 a month, per Syrian sources.
- ISIS sells oil and gas everywhere. It sells within Syria, and to the Syrian regime. It sells in Iraq. It is a more extensive and complex market than we assumed," a senior counter-terrorism official said.
@lars: if you want to see a clearly defined and executed strategy that might work, check any history web site and look at Winfield Scott's
Anaconda Plan that was the initial plan to defeating the CSA. It wasn't all that popular since it would not put down the rebellion quickly. It's ideological child, born a couple of years later, more or less worked as Grant and then Sherman put into place the plan that shut down the South's economic engines one at a time, while the battles in Virginia went back and forth. People are currently calling such an approach to Daesh "the long squeeze" in some of the commentary I've seen, but that's talking heads.
What a government leader will "sell" to the legislature or the public is quite another matter.