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ISIS财务出现困难
Isis struggles to balance books as finances squeezed (1010 words)
by Erika Solomon,February 27, 2015 15:28 pm
According to the Financial Action Task Force, it costs up to $10m a month for Isis to fund its fighters.
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Smokers used to be flogged in Syrian territory ruled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — now they are fined about $65. Local rulers dismantle old state facilities to sell for parts. And shopkeepers complain Isis fighters no longer spend so freely.
The world’s richest jihadi group is not as flush as it once was, say Syrians who live under its rule. Isis has cut spending on fuel and bread subsidies, while shaking down locals for cash. Fighters themselves may be feeling a squeeze too.
“Isis took some kind of financial hit . . . Some fighters’ salaries were cut, including my nephew,” said a man in the eastern city of Mayadin, on the Euphrates river, who says an apparent drop in the group’s revenues is making it difficult to cover the cost of Isis expansion in territory and membership since its lightning offensive last year.
Claims of belt-tightening are hard to confirm. Isis is a secretive organisation, particularly with its finances.
According to the US state department, it has $500m in liquid cash assets. But the group does seem to be restricting spending, potentially making it difficult to function like the caliphate it claims to be building.
This is unlikely to affect its capabilities as a militant organisation. According to the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body, it costs Isis up to $10m a month to fund its fighters.
“It’s harder for them to maintain the fiction of running a state in the eyes of local [people],” said a senior western diplomat who attended recent meetings of the anti-Isis coalition. “But if you are a member of the organisation itself, or a fighting group affiliated with it, then the money is still available.”
Yet some of Isis’s most profitable and straightforward sources of income are drying up. Before the coalition air strikes, Isis enjoyed a monopoly on captured oilfields in Syria and Iraq, where Isis holds nearly a third of each country’s territory. It controlled the entire supply chain, from crude extraction and wholesale export to the refining and sale of fuel products internally.
Since the coalition began attacking its makeshift refineries and fuel convoys, Isis has passed the business on to local allies and relies solely on crude extraction and sales of about $20 a barrel.
“Without selling the fuel, and only relying on crude, they lose about half of what their oil revenues once were,” said a gas plant worker in eastern Deir Ezzor province, who, like all sources in Isis-controlled areas, asked not be named.
Torbjorn Soltvedt, of Verisk Maplecroft, a UK-based risk analyst, estimates the group’s daily revenue from oil has dropped to $300,000 a day. Last year, analysts reckoned it made anything between $1m and $2m a day from oil.
“I don’t think this will lead to their collapse. But it might accelerate their implosion,” Mr Soltvedt said.
Opportunities to loot and kidnap for ransom, which Mr Soltvedt said earned Isis about $20m last year and which the FATF put at anything up to $45m, have also become rare as the coalition campaign slows Isis territorial gains.
Isis, which has lost hundreds of fighters since the coalition strikes, pays families 900,000 Syrian pounds (nearly $4,000) for each son killed, Raqqa residents say. With more than a thousand believed killed in the battle for the border town of Kobani alone, such payments could be an added financial burden. The group has also seen a string of commanders and emirs, or local rulers, fleeing — often with hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars.
In the past two months, at least five Isis officials have been executed for trying to abscond with large sums of money, according to locals and reports by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group. Yet the group has income to survive, notably from investments abroad and from taxing local businesses. It “still gets monthly extortion money from local businesses, taxes and the foreign transfers”, said Hisham al-Hashemi, an analyst of Islamist militants in Iraq.
A former Isis official, who asked to keep his identity secret because he fled the group, said Isis still had a secret pile of reserves abroad.
“Isis is in no danger of economic crisis,” he said. “They have enough to survive six more years of war like this.”
But recent efforts by Turkey to tighten border controls have made it harder for the human mules who bring money from abroad to get across, activists and the ex-Isis member say.
In Syria, locals list numerous signs they say show Isis is beginning to feel the strain. Fines are now imposed for unkempt shopfronts. A businessman from Raqqa, Isis’s de facto capital in northern Syria, told a local journalist he was forced to pay a $50,000 fine for overcharging some customers, an offence that once carried a $200 fine plus two days in prison.
Traders say Isis is now selling off Assad government infrastructure, such as subsidised bakeries and clinics, to private investors. One trader from Raqqa said Isis tried to sell equipment in army bases captured last summer.
“They took us into the soldiers’ dorms to buy whatever we want — the soldiers’ corpses were still inside, and body parts everywhere,” he said with disgust, before recalling he found “good bargains” on military bunk beds.
Yet even among Syrians who hate living under Isis rule, there is little joy at these signs of strain. One shopkeeper in Deir Ezzor said his revenue had halved in recent months, a big concern for locals like him, struggling to get by on a few dollars a day.
“Isis foreign fighters aren’t buying as much,” he said. “Syrians have no money any more, our economy collapsed — we’re dependent on those fighters. For us, the situation is worse.”
Additional reporting by Sam Jones and a local journalist in Isis territories, whose name is withheld for security reasons
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