Islamic State terrorist group has huge funds for future operations
“The Islamic State is sitting on mountains of stolen cash and gold” to be used for future attacks and to preserve the existence of the terrorist organization, The Washington Post, explained on Friday, in a report from Erbil.
As the Islamic State retreated from the territory it held in Iraq and Syria, it took with it “vast sums in Western and Iraqi currency and cold coins”—some $400 million, the Post said.
This conclusion has emerged from investigations in Erbil and Baghdad, following coordinated raids last October, carried out under the auspices of the US-led Coalition.
The Post’s reporting was conducted before President Donald Trump’s surprise decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, but it underscores a point made by its critics: the Islamic State is not yet defeated.
Indeed, Kurdish leaders have been warning for some time that the terrorist organization is making a comeback.
Last month, Najmaldin Karim, Governor of Kirkuk Province until Iraq’s October 2017 assault, told Kurdistan 24, “If people think that ISIS has been wiped out, and it is finished, there is nothing further from the truth.”
Some of the $400 million the Islamic State grabbed as it lost territory has been buried or hidden away, the Post said. However, it has also “laundered tens of millions of dollars by investing in legitimate businesses throughout the Middle East.”
“They can’t make money anymore by selling oil,” an official from the Counter Terrorism Department of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) told the Post, “so they’re making it in other ways.”
“They used to have oil fields and collect revenue and ransom from people,” Masrour Barzani, Chancellor of the Kurdistan Region Security Council, said. “But now all that is gone, and the fight has changed. Everything that was once clear is now clandestine.”
Paul Davis, a former Pentagon analyst and currently a Senior Fellow at Soran University, remarked that such a sophisticated financial operation as the Post described, did not seem to be the work of “a bunch of religious crazies,” but appeared “well thought and carefully executed.”
It reminded Davis of reports in 2003, following the fall of Baghdad and Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, that the Iraqi leader had stashed away large sums of cash and gold to fund the insurgency that followed what initially seemed a quick victory.
In 2015, the highly regarded news magazine, Der Spiegel, published a lengthy report about the Islamic State. The article, a leak from German intelligence, was based on captured documents and explained that the terrorist organization had been founded in Syria in 2012, as that country’s civil war began, by intelligence officers from the former Iraqi regime.
Kurdish officials have described the Islamic State in similar terms. “We believe that many groups are in cooperation, including the former Ba’ath regime’s supporters, former army members, and Ba’ath administrators, Kifah Mahmoud, an adviser to Masoud Barzani, then President of the Kurdistan Region, said in June 2014. “Most of the people in the region believe that the organization known as ISIL is actually founded and ruled by the Ba’ath.”
Americans, lacking such detailed knowledge, see something different. They see a stereotype: one Islamic figure—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—and his extremist followers. They do not even consider the possibility that al-Baghdadi might be a figurehead.
Kurdistan 24 recently discussed this issue with a well-informed Iraqi source, a Sunni Arab with extensive ties in the country. He stated, unequivocally, that members of the former Iraqi regime were at the core of the Islamic State.
He complained that many Muslim youth in Europe had only a shallow knowledge of their religion and the Islamic State exploited that. “Too many of them,” he said, “seem to think that Islam is all about ‘jihad” and fighting the West.
The US and its allies, are, inadvertently, contributing to this problem. Washington emphasizes the “ideology” of the Islamic State to the exclusion of other factors important to its success: i.e. accumulating and managing funds, as described by the Post; experience in ruling and controlling a population; as well as combat experience, including the expertise for major acts of terrorism.
A different approach to countering the Islamic State would highlight the role of the former Iraqi regime and warn those traveling to fight on its behalf that if they did so, they would be little more than cannon fodder for brutal men, seeking to recover what they lost in 2003.
This Iraqi source readily agreed that such an approach would reflect a more accurate understanding
of the Islamic State and would, almost certainly, be more effective in countering its propaganda and appeal.
Source: Kurdistan 24
