ISIS Uses Mafia Tactics To Fund Its Own Operations Without Help From Persian Gulf Donors
When fighters from the Islamic State of Syria and al-Sham stole tens of millions of dollars from a bank in Mosul earlier this year, it wasn’t simply a startling symbol of the collapse of Baghdad’s control over Iraq’s second-largest city. The brazen theft was instead a stark illustration of one of the most alarming aspects of ISIS’s rise: the group’s growing ability to fund its own operations through bank heists, extortion, kidnappings and other tactics more commonly associated with the mob than with violent Islamist extremists.
In its early years ISIS – like the Taliban and other Sunni militants – received most of its funding from wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and other Persian Gulf countries. Extremists in those U.S. ally states continue to send money to ISIS, but American counterterrorism officials believe that the group now finances the bulk of its recruitment, weapons purchases, and attacks without outside help. Even if the U.S. and its allies somehow stopped the flow of money from the Persian Gulf to the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, in other words, it would be too late to prevent ISIS from banking enough money to fight on for years.
“The overwhelming majority of their money comes from criminal activities like bank heists, extortion, robberies and smuggling,” said one U.S. counter-terrorism official.“They’re getting some money from outside donors, but that pales in comparison to their self-funding.”
The exact amount of money in ISIS’s possession is the subject of intense debate among Western intelligence officials. At the high end, some analysts estimate that the group may have access to at least $500 million in cash drawn from bank robberies, oil smuggling, and old-fashioned extortion and protection rackets. Other analysts believe the number is far lower, with one official putting it at between $100 million and $200 million. Those numbers are moving higher as the group conquers more cities on its seemingly inexorable drive toward Baghdad and is able to loot the local private and government banks. On Monday, ISIS fighters took the strategically important town of Tal Afar, adding to the territory under its direct control.
Calculating the true size of ISIS’s coffers is complicated by the lack of U.S. intelligence assets in the areas the group controls in Syria and Iraq and by the difficulty of sorting through the group’s sophisticated propaganda efforts. In closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill, senior officials from the intelligence community dismissed the initial reports that ISIS may have stolen more than $400 million from the bank in Mosul and said those figures were highly exaggerated. “We’re talking tens of millions from Mosul, not hundreds of millions,” one official said.
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