Left: Oil trafficking routes operated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Credit: Geopolitical Atlas, March 2015.
Presidential candidate, billionaire businessman Donald Trump has the right idea how to stop ISIS. “I would knock out the source of their wealth, the primary source of their wealth, which is oil,” he told MSNBC.
But a year into the United States led daily air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has done little, if anything, to stop the murderous Islamists group’s oil lifeline.
Reportedly, targeted bombing had killed a few of ISIS leaders and hundreds of their easily replaceable fighters. Yet strangely, it did not slow down the easy to spot movement of hundreds oil tankers and thousands of smaller vehicles, on the same route daily. You’d think a continuous movement would not escape notice of the intelligence services given the war-torn landscape and the small number of border crossings into Turkey.
As Dr. Norman Bailey, points out, the “Islamic State’s barbaric conquests are financed by collaborators among the business and financial circles of the West.” In his Globes online commentary.
Bailey identifies two major sources: funds seized from banks in the cities it has overrun, especially Mosul in Iraq, and from the sale of crude oil and products from the oil fields and refineries it has seized.”
He goes on to explains: “banks nowadays don’t hold hundreds of millions of dollars in banknotes and crude oil and products are good only to lubricate engines unless there are buyers as well as ways to get the products to the buyers. In other words, the funds of the banks can be obtained for use to pay its terrorist hordes and for other purposes only through the cooperation of other correspondent banks.”
“As to the oil,” Bailey rightly argues that “buyers are readily found in the West and tanker trucks are permitted to reach ports where oil tankers are waiting to load it.””All this requires ready, willing and able collaborators among the business and financial circles of the West as well as surrounding countries. This is not the place to name names, but the buyers and the facilitators and the financiers are not that difficult to identify, so that if the opponents of Islamic State were really serious about doing something about it, along with the occasional bombing raid, the Islamic State could be starved of funds to continue its rampage of murder, destruction, rape and slavery.”
Bailey notes that while Iran was forced to the negotiating table because the sanctions regime effectively deprived it “of necessary funds (along with a falling oil price), However, “ISIS doesn’t even have to negotiate. It has had no trouble finding collaborators among the worshippers of MAMMON” in the West, allowing to pursue its bloody conquests.”
While the debate on putting American troops on the ground to fight ISIS goes on, the sooner the U.S. targets the oil refineries and the tanker convoys and goes after the bankers who assist ISIS funding, the sooner this Islamist menace could be defeated.