Over five different trips to Iraq, a team of New York Times journalists unearthed more than 15,000 pages of Islamic State documents. The papers have shed light on a crucial question: Where did the terror group get its money from?
oil not the main source
The US and its allies were bombing oil fields controlled by the terror group in a bid to strangle IS’s source of funds. Some people also assumed that some countries were financing the IS, described as one of the world’s richest terror groups. But the files unearthed by the Times show that the major part of their revenue came from taxing people under their rule
“The world knows the Islamic State for its brutality, but the militants did not rule by the sword alone. They wielded power through two complementary tools: brutality and bureaucracy,” writes Times journalist Rukmini Callimachi, as part of her extensive reporting on what she calls ISIS Files
Taxation by Islamic State
One of the forms recovered by Callimachi from Islamic State’s Ministry of Agriculture showed that on one day in 2016, an IS accountant received $150,000 (at today’s exchange rate) from two traders for the sale of grain. And this is where IS had an advantage. According to international norms “you can’t exactly bomb a barley field. Or a flock of sheep”. One document showed how on a day in 2015, the group got $7,500 by taxing the sale of sheep’s milk
We dismiss the IS as savage. It is savage. We dismiss it as barbaric. It is barbaric. But at the same time these people realised the need to maintain institutions. The Islamic State’s capacity to govern is really as dangerous as their combatants
Fawaz A Gerges, author of ISIS: A History, to the NYT