Islamic State raking in millions on oil sales, now world’s richest terror group

Islamic State militants are amassing wealth at an unprecedented pace, earning about $1 million a day from black market oil sales alone, a U.S. Treasury Department official said Thursday. David Cohen, who leads the department’s effort to undermine the Islamic State’s finances, said the extremists also get several million dollars a month from wealthy donors, extortion rackets and other criminal activities, such as robbing banks. In addition, he said the group has taken in at least $20 million in ransom payments this year from kidnappings.

They rob banks. They lay waste to thousands of years of civilization in Iraq and Syria by looting and selling antiquities … They steal livestock and crops from farmers. And despicably, they sell abducted girls and women as sex slaves.

David Cohen, U.S. Treasury Department

"With the important exception of some state-sponsored terrorist organizations, IS is probably the best-funded terrorist organization we have confronted," Cohen, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "It has amassed wealth at an unprecedented pace." The group, which extracts oil from territory it has captured across Syria and Iraq, wants to create a caliphate, or Islamic empire, in the Middle East. Led by Iraqi militant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State initially tried to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but other groups, including al-Qaida central command, turned against IS because of its brutality. Unlike the core al-Qaida terrorist network, IS gets only a small share of funding from deep-pocket donors and therefore does not depend primarily on moving money across international borders. Instead, the Islamic State group obtains the vast majority of its revenue through local criminal and terrorist activities, Cohen said.

Middle East