ISIS cash source, by Pulitzer Prize and peace arbiter HWPL

How ISIS Wrings Cash From Those It Now Controls

A System of Extortion
Mimicking a Real State With Revenue Raised in Taxes and Fines

By Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Kulish and Steven Lee Myers

Three times a month, Mohammad al-Kirayfawai hands $300 to fighters from the Islamic State for the privilege of driving his refrigerated truck full of ice cream and other perishables from Jordan to a part of Iraq where the militants are firmly in charge.

The fighters who man the border post treat the payment as an import duty, not a bribe. They even provide a stamped receipt, with the logo and seal of the Islamic State, that Mr. Kirayfawai, 38, needs for passing through other checkpoints on his delivery route.

Refuse to pay and the facade of normality quickly falls away. “If I do not,” Mr. Kirayfawai explained, “they either arrest me or burn my truck.”

MidnightWatcher's Blogspot - WordPress.com

Across wide expanses of Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State, with the goal of building a credible government, has set up a predatory and violent bureaucracy that wrings every last American dollar, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pound it can from those who live under its control or pass through its territory.

Interviews with more than a dozen people living inside or recently escaped from the Islamic State-controlled territory, and Western and Middle Eastern officials who track the militants’ finances, describe the group as exacting tolls and traffic tickets; rent for government buildings; utility bills for water and electricity; taxes on income, crops and cattle; and fines for smoking or wearing the wrong clothes.

The earnings from these practices that mimic a traditional state total tens of millions of dollars a month, approaching $1 billion a year, according to some estimates by American and European officials. And that is a revenue stream that has so far proved largely impervious to sanctions and air raids.

“They fight in the morning and they tax in the afternoon,” said Louise Shelley, the director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University.

Faithfreedom.org

The better known of the Islamic State’s revenue sources — smuggling oil, plundering bank vaults, looting antiquities, ransoming kidnapped foreigners and drumming up donations from wealthy supporters in the Persian Gulf — have all helped make the group arguably the world’s richest militant organization. But as Western and Middle Eastern officials have gained a better understanding of the Islamic State’s finances over the past year, a broad consensus has emerged that its biggest source of cash appears to be the people it rules, and the businesses it controls.

In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris this month, the United States has more aggressively targeted the militants’ oil production and smuggling operations, which it had held off from doing for fear of inflicting long-term damage to the Iraqi and Syrian economies. American aircraft this month struck a convoy of oil tanker trucks in eastern Syria, destroying 116 vehicles.

Ultimately, though, many officials and experts said the Islamic State would probably be able to cover its costs even without oil revenue, and that so long as it controls large stretches of Iraq and Syria, including major cities, bankrupting the group would take a lot more than blowing up oil tankers.

“These are all going to be little pinpricks into Islamic State financing unless you can take their revenue bases away from them, and that means the territory they control,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation.

Inside that territory, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has taken over the legitimate revenue collection operations of the governments it has usurped. And it has used the ever-present threat of violence to extract as much as it can from the people, businesses and property it now controls.

In the Bab al-Tob neighborhood of Mosul, Iraq, for instance, the militants turned a police station that dated to the 19th-century Ottoman era into a market, with 60 shops selling fruits and vegetables. The annual rent for a market stall is 2.8 million Iraqi dinars, or roughly $2,500.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/06/news/isis-funding/

In Raqqa, the Syrian city that is now the de facto capital of the Islamic State, a department called Diwan al-Khadamat, or the Office of Services, sends officials through the city markets to collect a cleaning tax — 2,500 to 5,000 Syrian pounds, or about $7 to $14, per month depending on the size of the shop. Residents go to collection points to pay their monthly electricity and water bills, 800 Syrian pounds, or roughly $2.50 for electricity and 400 pounds, about $1.20, for water.

Another Islamic State department, the Diwan al-Rikaz, or the Office of Resources, oversees oil production and smuggling, the looting of antiquities and a long list of other businesses now controlled by the militants. It operates water-bottling and soft-drink plants, textile and furniture workshops, and mobile phone companies, as well as tile, cement and chemical factories, skimming revenues from all of them.

The Islamic State also demands a cut of the revenues earned by small businesses. “We either pay in olive oil or cash, it depends on the production,” said Tarek, a Syrian in Beirut who supports the government of President Bashar al-Assad. He asked to be identified by only his first name because his parents are still living and working on the family farm in Al Bab, an area controlled by the Islamic State, outside the city of Aleppo.

Officials of the so-called caliphate dislike the term “tax,” preferring the Islamic term “zakat,” which refers to the alms Muslims are required to pay. Although the norm would be 2.5 percent of a person’s wealth under typical interpretations of Islamic law, the militants are taking 10 percent, justifying the high rate by saying they are a “nation in a time of war,” according to a citizen journalist in Raqqa who asked for his safety to be identified only as Abu Mouaz.

http://eliasbejjaninews.com/2016/01/01/34531/

The group has taken over the collection of car-registration fees, and made students pay for textbooks. It has even fined people for driving with broken taillights, a practice that is nearly unheard-of on the unruly roads of the Middle East.

Fines are also included in the punishments meted out for breaking the strict living rules imposed by the Islamic State. Smoking is strictly forbidden, for example, and Mohammad Hamid, 29, said that when he was caught smoking a cigar in his shop in Mosul in late August, “ISIS not only whipped me 15 times in public but forced me to pay a fine of 50,000 dinar,” or about $40 at the time. He soon after fled to a Kurdish area of Iraq.

In all, some officials estimate that the Islamic State is extracting as much as $800 or $900 million, possibly more, from residents or businessmen inside the territory it controls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrfaNM815zM

That is on top of revenues from oil smuggling, which are estimated to bring an additional $500 million. The group also earns tens of millions of dollars more from other revenue sources, such as kidnapping. And it looted roughly $1 billion from banks in the towns and cities it took over — including $675 million in Mosul alone — though that was a one-time source of revenue.

But intelligence gleaned from defectors, communication intercepts and on raids has yielded only so much information about the relatively complex financial structure inside its territory.

“There is nothing that would let me suspect that we have a complete sense of the central bookkeeping operations,” said a European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified intelligence.

After oil and taxes, “everything else is a rounding error,” said Daniel Benjamin, who was the top counterterrorism official at the State Department and is now a scholar at Dartmouth College.

Mr. Benjamin said that given the group’s scope and ambition it could not be “judged by the standards of other terrorist groups.” Only the “pseudo-state” of Colombia’s FARC, which once controlled territory the size of Switzerland, came close. But he said the Islamic State’s economic model would be hard to maintain in the long run.

In the short term, American and European officials are struggling to cut the group’s revenues. But the old strategy for stopping the flow of money to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, which was largely based on cutting them off from donors in the Persian Gulf upon which they depend, does not apply to the Islamic State.

“They derive so much of their resources internally, that more traditional counterterror finance tools we would apply, say in the case of Al Qaeda, to cut off a terror organization from its income sources are not applicable in this case,” said Daniel L. Glaser, the assistant Treasury secretary for terrorist financing. “They don’t rely on donors.”

Instead, the United States and its allies have concentrated their efforts on trying “to stop them from getting access to the financial system,” he said.

That has also proved to be difficult. The Islamic State trades with individuals and businesses in the countries it is fighting, selling oil at cut-rate prices to Kurds in Iraq and the government of Mr. Assad, among others.

The Treasury Department has imposed sanctions on nearly three dozen people linked to the Islamic State’s finances, and last week expanded those to include a Syrian construction executive who it charged is helping Mr. Assad buy oil from the Islamic State, and Kirsan N. Ilyumzhinov, the Russian businessman who heads the World Chess Federation and was accused of “materially assisting” top Syrian officials and bankers.

Officials assume that the Islamic State must be circulating the money it collects back out into the regional and global financial system since there have not been signs of the kind of rampant inflation that could result from a large influx of currency into a relatively small economy closed off from the surrounding markets.

Money-changing and transfer businesses in southern Turkey are another particular concern because they are believed to be helping the militants launder money, the European official said.

In a reflection of the growing frustration with Turkey, the State Department pointedly mentioned the use of the city of Gaziantep as a transit point for fighters heading to the Islamic State when it recently announced a $5 million reward for a senior militant figure.

The militant, Tirad al-Jarba, better known by his nom de guerre Abu-Muhammad al-Shimali, is the Islamic State’s border chief, and runs one of the group’s logistics committees that coordinates “smuggling activities, financial transfers, and the movement of supplies into Syria and Iraq,” according to the State Department.

But in the long run, according to American officials, the surest way to significantly restrict the group’s finances will be to retake territory it controls, something that has been painstakingly slow so far, despite thousands of airstrikes.

“The only one sure way to take away their wealth, their revenue base,” one senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters, “is going to be through military force.”

Matthew Rosenberg and Steven Lee Myers reported from Washington, and Nicholas Kulish from New York. Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon, Falih Hassan and Omar al-Jawoshy from Baghdad, employees of The New York Times from Erbil and Anbar Provinces, Iraq, Mohammad Ghannam and Nabih Bulos from Paris, and Tim Arango from Essex Junction, Vt.

Original post
http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/new-york-times-staff-1

The Solution of ISIS Is On the Pen

The Pulitzer Prize is now promoting a war. At the last paragraph of the article “How ISIS Wrings Cash From Those In Now Controls” of Pulitzer Prize, the author concluded the report like this: “The only one sure way to take away their wealth, their revenue base,” one senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters, “is going to be through military force.” The author positioned this quote on the end of writing so that he stresses military assault to ISIS. However, if the war started with ISIS, the terrorism of ISIS would become much more dangerous degree. Whole world wide especially some nations which are directly engaged with the war will be under the very hazardous state and many faultless citizens can be killed. In addition, there are many citizens who are innocent and want to live in a peace like any other counties’ citizens, in the area ruled by ISIS. Already lots of Syrians lose their houses and killed by airstrikes. The gun will bring more bloods. The possible solution is dialogue for the reason that the fundamental problem of ISIS is on the religious doctrine and some leading powers, not to normal citizens who will be the main victims of war.

To begin with, religious agreement would be the key point to solve the ISIS problem. Opening a war against ISIS cannot solve the fundamental problem due to the reason that ISIS is an organization based on the religious belief. For example, there were a lot of conflict and wars in the middle east and in many case, religious doctrine difference was the underlying reason. The effect of the religious doctrine for one nation in the middle east has been huge. As the change of leader who has different ideal for their religion in a nation, the law system and regulations are changed. An example is the transformation of woman status in the middle east country. As the change of a leader, sometimes women get power and sometimes they cannot even go to school. It was due to the difference of each leader’s religious viewpoint. In addition, many terror organizations also based on religious belief of their own and they say that their terror activities are missions for God. Even though they have same religion of Islam, they have different point of view about their religion and even kill each other. ISIS(Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is also based on their own belief and they are trying to make every nations to have same doctrine with them. All Islam have one religious book which name is Quran. However, due to the difference of interpretation, they even killing each other. Without fundamental agreement of religious doctrine, conflict cannot be stopped so that the war will make only bleed.

Summit with the leaders of ISIS is critical for the reason that they are the controllers of whole system. Citizens don’t have responsibility so that the war against ISIS is inappropriate and will make lots of death of innocent people. They are just under the control of the leading powers while they are living in their hometown. For example, North Korea is recognized as very dangerous state however, it is due to the dangerous government which ruled by one party, not because of citizens. Those Citizens are usually same with any of us. Even they afraid their government and hope the peaceful world. For another example, Japanese government still doesn’t apologize their barbarity like the managing of comfort woman in the World War 2. The government even distorted their history of invasion as good way and teach it to the youth. It’s clear that Japanese government is doing wrong but it doesn’t mean the Japanese citizens are bad also. This is just the behavior caused by one leading party of Japan. Like these examples, the responsibility is to some leading powers. For this reason, the war which makes a lot of citizen victims shouldn’t be occurred. Rather, the summit which can persuade the leaders of ISIS is need. They are same human beings with us and the difference is the way of thinking. If one’s personal profit and desire are the purpose of the existence of ISIS, it could be more hard to correct. However, if the problem is in the difference of idea, then progress can be made. Gathering of summits to discuss what is right and wrong is need.

Although making agreement of religious doctrine and persuading the leader of ISIS would be a hard mission, it’s much better than killing lots of innocent citizens without fundamental approaching. The importance of dialogue cannot be underestimated for the reason that it can deal with the fundamental causes of ISIS problem. The pen is mightier than the sword. And sword only makes another sword: revenge bears another revenge. The important thing is not killing people but changing their thinking. This is the essential solution. Making agreement wouldn’t be easy but this is only the way that can solve the root of the conflict. Arbiter who can deal with this problem would be needed.

Whole things are based on religious problem. For that reason, I think HWPL(Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light) can deal with this problem. HWPL has made unification of religion. I hope HWPL also work for Middle East conflicts. Peace education for the youth and effective international peace laws that can stop war and unification of religion are needed to solve the world issue, ISIS. I view world could find real meaning of religion through HWPL WARP(World Alliance of Religious Peace) Summit.