Who’s Funding the Islamic State?

The two articles talk about how the Islamic State is being funded and the countries the donors actually come from. Many questions have come up of how ISIS is being funded and both of the article explain a bit of who and what they are doing with the money they receive. The first article is called, “Who’s Funding ISIS Wealthy Gulf ‘Angle Investors”, this article goes in depth about where the major investors actually come from. The Islamic State likes to called their investors the”angle investors” Most of these investors are rich Arabs. These investors essentially help the group get on their feet and once they are, ISIS will then turn to other means to get their money. The article states that the group will “kidnapping, oil smuggle, sell women into slavery, ect.” This article also says, that most of the investors come from Qatar rather than Saudi Arabia. It’s sad that very little of ISIS total annual income comes from outside sources like investors. The article also mentions that ISIS makes around $1m a day from all sources, which include oil smuggling from the Turkish border. Even though is making all this money there is a flaw to it. Many U.S. officials state that as the group expands, the more enemies they gain the more vulnerable the group will become. In the second article talks about how ISIS is actually getting the money to finance their wars. The Islamic State has taken over many of the oil and refineries in northern Iraq and northern Syria, which is where they get most of their wealth as well as other means like I mentioned before. This oil is being smuggled into Turkey because there oil is a “prized commodity.” The cost of gasoline in Turkey is about roughly $7.50 per gallon. A way the international community has done to cut the capita going into ISIS is by destroying some of the oil facilities they have taken over. It is believe that ISIS makes millions of dollars a month due to their oil smuggling business and about 1 to 2 million dollars a day. According to Mathew Levitt (director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute), ISIS “funded like no other traditional terrorist group in the past. Besides revenue from oil smuggling, the group receives money through donations from wealthy sympathizers in countries including Qatar and Kuwait.” Another way the group makes money is by tax anything they want in the areas they control,”They’re taxing the people; that’s a huge revenue,” he says of ISIS. “But not only that. They also control sort of the breadbasket of Syria, in terms of Raqqa (their defacto capital). They’ve got the cotton and the wheat and all these other things. All of these serve as sort of economic and powerhouse or funding for ISIS.”As we can see from both article is that ISIS is completely different than any other group we have see in the way they make their money as well as who’s funding them. I believe that the people that are funding ISIS, are funding global terrorism and encouraging them. But at the same time ISIS are finding their own ways of making money, which is something very dangerous because of the fact that they are learning how to support themselves.

ISIS Makes Millions Each Day for Oil