Three Ways ISIS Gets Its Money

Kid­nap­pings, an­tiquit­ies traf­fick­ing, and private dona­tions.

Those are three—though cer­tainly not the only three—of the ways that the Is­lam­ic State, or “IS­IS,” the ter­ror­ist or­gan­iz­a­tion re­spons­ible for the at­tacks in Par­is, funds its vi­ol­ent op­er­a­tion.

While much of its fund­ing comes from oil sales, the group has also re­sor­ted to cap­tur­ing in­di­vidu­als in an at­tempt to ex­tract pay­ment for their safe re­turn. The group has kid­napped Amer­ic­ans and oth­ers, and in cases when pay­ment was not made, grue­somely murdered them and re­leased the videos on the In­ter­net.

IS­IS has kid­napped “multi-hun­dreds, if not thou­sands of vic­tims,” John Cas­sara, a former spe­cial agent for the U.S. Treas­ury De­part­ment, told law­makers on a House For­eign Af­fairs pan­el Tues­day. The group has used kid­nap­pings to raise around $45 mil­lion in 2014, he noted, cit­ing a Fin­an­cial Ac­tion Task Force re­port.

“In fact, be­cause kid­nap­ping and as­so­ci­ated crime, such as ex­tor­tion, has been so suc­cess­ful, it ap­pears the av­er­age ransom pay­ment is in­creas­ing,” he ad­ded, de­scrib­ing a “vi­cious cycle” in which pay­ing ransoms leads to more kid­nap­pings, with those kid­nap­pings in turn lead­ing to more ransoms.

…

“IS­IS ac­tu­ally makes more money off of oil sales,” test­i­fied Dr. Dav­id An­drew Wein­berg, a seni­or fel­low at the Found­a­tion for De­fense of Demo­cra­cies, “but ransoms have helped it and al-Qaeda con­quer that ter­rit­ory in the first place.”

An­oth­er source of rev­en­ue for ter­ror­ist or­gan­iz­a­tions are private dona­tions from in­di­vidu­als in oth­er coun­tries. Dr. Wein­berg lis­ted four U.S. al­lies that “pur­sue prob­lem­at­ic or even ad­versari­al po­s­i­tions” over private dona­tions to ter­ror­ist or­gan­iz­a­tions: Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Ar­a­bia, and Tur­key.

“Des­pite prom­ises to do so, they have failed to ef­fect­ively ob­struct the flow of such funds and to try pun­ish­ing its prac­ti­tion­ers,” he ar­gued, say­ing his writ­ten testi­mony—avail­able on the sub­com­mit­tee’s web­site—in­cludes “dozens of ex­amples of such neg­li­gence.”

Dr. Wein­berg went on to ar­gue that “the U.S. should de­vel­op a broad range of op­tions for when our al­lies re­fuse to do the right thing versus ter­ror fin­an­ci­ers.”

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