How ISIS Became the World’s Richest Terror Group

The decapitated body of Khaled al-Asaad was hung in Palmyra last August, after he’d been brutally tortured for a month. The senior archaeologist, who served for 40 years as head of the ancient Syrian city’s antiquities authority, was taken to the central square of the new city of Palmyra and beheaded by a masked man, in front of a large crowd. A sign was hung on his body detailing his “crimes” – among them loyalty to Syrian President Bashar Assad and visiting the Shi’ite enemy, Iran.

But Asaad, 81, was murdered for a different reason. The torture he’d undergone was administered not for religious reasons but economic ones: it was aimed at extracting information from him that would lead Islamic State to hundreds of artifacts and hidden, valuable treasures from the 3,000-year-old city. The taking of Palmyra by Islamic State had sparked fervent concern that the ancient city would be destroyed. In fact, though, ISIS saw the antiquities as another way to make money, as part of a broad economic infrastructure based in the wide swaths of territory the group has conquered over the past two years.

…

According to Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, an expert on terror financing and a senior fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in Washington, ISIS is trying to diversify its income in various ways, like the sale of antiquities. In many cases, they destroy the archaeological sites only after they’ve taken artifacts from them they can be sold on the black market. At a recent conference of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Gartenstein-Ross noted that the global antiquities market is not properly regulated. As a result, ISIS succeeds in selling antiquities for substantial sums to merchants in Turkey, Europe and North America.

Gartenstein-Ross believes most estimates of Islamic State’s earnings are inaccurate, because it’s hard to obtain precise information from the chaos that prevails in the region.

He adds that ISIS sells its oil at a substantial discount only to Middle Eastern customers, including to its enemies – from the Kurds to the Assad regime.

…

Read the full article here.