Terror Cash – Targeting Businesses that Fuel Jihadists

The war against militant Islam takes many forms. There are the boots on the ground. There’s the battle for hearts and minds—in the real world as well as the digital sphere. And then, of course, there’s the fight against the cash flow. Every enterprise from your neighborhood McDonalds to a Salafist terror cell needs a good business model behind them. Everyone has to pay the bills.

Obviously, jihadists are typically less constrained in the methods they use to procure steady revenue. This tends to be a huge advantage. After all, the more illegal the product, the more lucrative the business tends to be. However, jihadists aren’t insistent their merchandise is illicit, just highly profitable.

One of the most important, recent shifts US policymakers have made targets their business infrastructure. The success of this plan will likely be one of the biggest—if not the biggest—determining factor in whether or not these groups can be ultimately defeated. The reason for that is jihadist groups have a unique resilience that makes them hard to stomp out. Militant groups like the Taliban, for instance, are usually much more adept fighters than local authorities. To avoid a direct face-to-face fight against Western armies they cannot win, they will hide in the periphery areas of the country that they know well until they can reemerge and take on the weaker local forces.

This is the story of Afghanistan over the past 17 years. These ideologies cannot be killed on a battlefield as easily as soldiers. Even after ISIS has lost nearly all of its territorial gains over the past year, the group continues to be a radicalizing force around the world, and an inspiration for planning attacks in the US and Europe.

Winning battles is important. But considering the strategies jihadists use to stay afloat, the only thing that will be a permanent solution is sucking them dry of financial resources. There have been mixed reports about how well this is going. There are two important fronts that deserve attention.

The first is the oil industry of the Islamic State. Fortunately, the US continues to make headway in targeting this source of revenue. Recently, leaders of the Inherent Resolve coalition announced that four ISIS leaders were killed in targeted strikes, all with connections to the group’s illicit “Oil and Gas Network.” The report reads in part: “Abu Khattab al-Iraqi, the network’s leader, managed revenue generation through the illicit sale of oil and gas. The other three men killed, Abu Yusuf al-Hashimi, Abu Hajir Milhim, and Abu Hiba al-Maghrebi, facilitated these operations.” According to the Joint Task Force, “The death of these Daesh members hinders the terrorist group’s ability to finance operations throughout Iraq and Syria. With the removal of this network, the ability to pay fighters, procure weapons, and maintain equipment will be degraded.”

This incident was only the latest in a relatively long-standing objective to deny ISIS access to reliable funding. For years, policymakers understood that oil is the black gold that funds ISIS’ black flag. As the Islamic State won more territory, it was able to increase its oil assets as well. When groups pushed through northern Iraq five years ago, eventually taking Mosul, it seized numerous fields including the Ajil and Allas fields in north-eastern Iraq’s Kirkuk province.

When President Obama launched the international coalition to fight ISIS, hundreds of bombing missions were directed toward oil infrastructure. After Daesh lost most of its holdings in Iraq last year, one would have thought the group would be unable to continue profiting from oil in the region. However, ISIS found a way to continue exploiting local, financially desperate workers to continue the production and delivery of oil.

Even though militants technically no longer controlled the territory, they were still able to siphon off oil production and sell it to black market buyers. Thus, the ISIS leaders that run this illegal network, like the ones recently eliminated, have become prime targets of the coalition. However, the highly profitable, terror-funding oil smuggling continues.

In late May, international media reported that Taliban commanders have begun ordering all drug labs to be moved out of urban areas the insurgency controls, as US airstrikes targeting the facilities are killing a rising number of civilians. Taliban’s shadow governor of Helmand, Mullah Manan, allegedly told his subordinates in an intercepted communique that “due to one factory hundreds of the public are at risk from bombings and missiles” and for facilities to shift to “mountains and valley sides” instead.

The fact that militants have been forced to literally uproot these facilities because of the danger they pose to their surroundings is a good indication the US plan of destroying them is making significant progress.

Back in November of last year, US military sources reported the beginning of bombing campaigns targeting Taliban- run opium production facilities throughout Afghanistan. According to reports, the bombings were essentially a series of attacks on narcotics laboratories in southern Afghanistan, marking the start of what could become a long, expanded air war on Taliban drug infrastructure. As Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told media sources, the bombings were the implementation of new powers granted to the president which allow him to target Taliban revenue streams in addition to actual fighters and military assets. Nicholson concluded his statement with “there are many, many targets that have been identified” and that US armed forces will “continue to strike these targets as we further refine them.”

At the time the campaign began, the American Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that there are 400 to 500 opium facilities across Afghanistan that constitute a major source of cash for the militant group. According to estimates, the Taliban pulls in around $400 million in profit from opium sales per year.

Since November, some 120 strikes targeting opium facilities have been carried out.

Despite the progress of the military in destroying the opium industry in Afghanistan, reports by American officials have indicated that the sector has only been growing. Recently, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), told media sources that the effort to stem the tide of opium production has been a failure since it began in late 2017. “There’s more opium being grown now than when we started, there’s more heroin being produced than when we started, there’s more heroin being exported, there are more profits from the heroin going to the Taliban and to the other terrorist groups than when we started,” said Sopko. The reasons for this failure are not exactly clear. Perhaps the Taliban is rebuilding labs faster than the US can locate and destroy them. The possibility always exists that many labs—perhaps most—are in hidden or even in underground locations.

In addition to the tactical challenges in locating and destroying business infrastructure, US policymakers face another challenge in their mission to destroy militant-linked enterprise in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

The sad fact is that these illicit markets are very much a part of the local economies in these regions. The drug war the United States has been waging in Afghanistan has the potential for major social impact on Afghans. In the past, when circumstances curtailed opium production, farmers around the countries were left destitute. Even if one would brand destroying opium production as a noble endeavor, it would not only affect the drug trade and global heroin production. Because opium is such a large portion of Afghanistan’s GDP, the economy of the entire country would suffer.

Targeting Islamic State’s oil profits is even more complicated. ISIS has been exploiting legitimate oil markets in areas technically under government control, in order to continue profiting from the petrol industry. Destroying the networks that handle the oil for ISIS would mean cutting off energy supplies for civilians as well. For the same reason, sanctions on oil emanating from these regions would also be ineffective as it is almost impossible to determine if any given shipment or delivery originated from ISIS or from lawful producers.

Thus, American planners find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Wreak havoc on the livelihood and infrastructure of millions of civilians, or let be the enterprises that fund the militant war machine.

Additionally, the new US strategy has the ability to shift Afghanistan’s economy to more legitimate areas, making it feasible that the country could integrate into a global market. These efforts are not new. The United States has sought ways to encourage other areas of commerce in the past.

Source: opslens