WASHINGTON (AP) —
Islamic State militants are amassing wealth at an unprecedented pace,
earning about $1 million a day from black market oil sales alone, a
Treasury Department official said Thursday.
David Cohen,
who leads the department's effort to undermine the Islamic State's
finances, said the extremists also get several million dollars a month
from wealthy donors, extortion rackets and other criminal activities,
such as robbing banks. In addition, he said the group has taken in at
least $20 million in ransom payments this year from kidnappings.
"With
the important exception of some state-sponsored terrorist
organizations, IS is probably the best-funded terrorist organization we
have confronted," Cohen, undersecretary for terrorism and financial
intelligence, said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington. "It has amassed wealth at an
unprecedented pace."
The group, which extracts oil from territory
it has captured across Syria and Iraq, wants to create a caliphate, or
Islamic empire, in the Middle East. Led by Iraqi militant Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State initially tried to oust Syrian President
Bashar Assad, but other groups, including al-Qaida central command,
turned against IS because of its brutality.Unlike the core al-Qaida terrorist network, IS gets only a small share of funding from deep-pocket donors and therefore does not depend primarily on moving money across international borders. Instead, the Islamic State group obtains the vast majority of its revenues through local criminal and terrorist activities, Cohen said, acknowledging that Treasury's tool are not particularly well-suited to combating extortion and local crime.
"They rob banks. They lay waste to thousands of years of civilization in Iraq and Syria by looting and selling antiquities," he said. "They steal livestock and crops from farmers. And despicably, they sell abducted girls and women as sex slaves."
In the Iraqi city of Mosul, Islamic State terrorists are reportedly going door-to-door, business-to-business, demanding cash at gunpoint, he said.
"A
grocery store owner who refused to pay was warned with a bomb outside
his shop. Others, who have not paid, have seen their relatives
kidnapped. ... We've also seen reports that when customers make cash
withdrawals from local banks where ISIL operates, ISIL has demanded as
much as 10 percent of the value." Cohen said, using an acronym for the
group.
Most of the group's
money, however, comes from extracting oil and selling it to smugglers,
who, in turn, transport the oil outside territory under Islamic State
control.
"It is difficult to
get precise revenue estimates ... but we estimate that beginning in
mid-June, ISIL has earned approximately $1 million a day from oil
sales," Cohen said. Other estimates have ranged as high as $3 million a
day.
Treasury said IS is
selling oil at substantially discounted prices to a variety of
middlemen, including some from Turkey, who then transport the oil to be
resold. "It also appears that some of the oil emanating from territory
where ISIL operates has been sold to Kurds in Iraq, and then resold into
Turkey," he said.
Cohen said the Syrian government also has allegedly arranged to buy oil from IS.
He
noted that U.S-led airstrikes on the group's oil refineries are
threatening the militants' supply networks and that Turkey and the
Kurdistan Regional Government — the official ruling body of the
predominantly Kurdish region of northern Iraq —are working to prevent IS
oil from crossing their borders.
Cohen acknowledged, however, that IS moves oil in illicit networks outside the formal economy, making it harder to track.
"But
at some point, that oil is acquired by someone who operates in the
legitimate economy and who makes use of the financial system. He has a
bank account. His business may be financed, his trucks may be insured,
his facilities may be licensed," he said.
"We
not only can cut them off from the U.S. financial system and freeze
their assets, but we can also make it very difficult for them to find a
bank anywhere that will touch their money or process their
transactions."
Treasury also
is going after individuals who donate money to IS and is urging
officials in Qatar and Kuwait to do more to target terror financiers in
their countries. A key, he said, is to restrict the militant group's
access to the international financial system.
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