So the proceeds from a hundred-odd oil trucks doesn't explain how ISIS pays its bills. Nor does the speculation about ISIS's antiquity sales. So if Islamic State does not get the bulk of its funds from such sources, where does the money come from?
The Saudi Connection
The politically inconvenient answer is from the outside, i.e., from other parts of the Middle East where the oil fields are not marginal as they are in northern Syria and Iraq, but, rather, rich and productive; where refineries are state of the art, and where oil travels via pipeline instead of in trucks. It is also a market in which corruption is massive, financial controls are lax, and ideological sympathies for both ISIS and Al Qaeda run strong.
This means the Arab Gulf states of Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, countries with massive reserves of wealth despite a 50-percent plunge in oil prices. The Gulf states are politically autocratic, militantly Sunni, and, moreover, are caught in a painful ideological bind.
Worldwide, Sunnis outnumber Shi'ites by at least four to one. But among the eight nations ringing the Persian Gulf, the situation is reversed, with Shi'ites outnumbering Sunnis by nearly two to one. The more theocratic the world grows -- and theocracy is a trend not only in the Muslim world, but in India, Israel and even the U.S. if certain Republicans get their way -- the more sectarianism intensifies.
At its most basic, the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict is a war of succession among followers of Muhammad, who died in the Seventh Century. The more one side gains political control in the name of Islam, consequently, the more vulnerable it becomes to accusations from the other side that its claim to power is less than legitimate.
The Saudi royal family, which styles itself as the "custodian of the two holy mosques" of Mecca and Medina, is especially sensitive to such accusations, if only because its political position seems to be growing more and more precarious. This is why it has thrown itself into an anti-Shi'ite crusade from Yemen to Bahrain to Syria.
While the U.S., Britain and France condemn Bashar al-Assad as a dictator, that's not why Sunni rebels are now fighting to overthrow him. They are doing so instead because, as an Alawite, a form of Shi'ism, he belongs to a branch of Islam that the petro-sheiks in Riyadh regard as a challenge to their very existence.
Civil war is rarely a moderating force, and as the struggle against Assad has intensified, power among the rebels has shifted to the most militant Sunni forces, up to and including Al Qaeda and its even more aggressive rival, ISIS.
In other words, the Islamic State is not homegrown and self-reliant, but a product and beneficiary of larger forces, essentially a proxy, paramilitary army of Gulf state sheiks. Evidence of broad regional support is abundant even if news outlets like The New York Times have done their best to ignore it. Some of the highlights of this money trail:
--In a 2009 diplomatic memo made public by Wikileaks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide."
(On Thursday, in a hawkish speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton, now the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, focused on her plan for military escalation, including a U.S. invasion of Syria to "impose no-fly zones" and secure what she called a "safe area." But she added a brief and exasperated reference to the financial reality, saying: "once and for all, the Saudis, the Qataris and others need to stop their citizens from directly funding extremist organizations as well as the schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path to radicalization.")
--An August 2012 report by the Defense Intelligence Agency stating that Al Qaeda, Salafists, and the Muslim Brotherhood dominated the Syrian rebel movement and that their goal was to establish a "Salafist principality in eastern Syria" where Islamic State's caliphate is now located.
--The Times's own report two months earlier stating that the C.I.A. was working with the Muslim Brotherhood to channel Turkish-, Saudi- and Qatari-supplied arms to Sunni rebels in Syria.
--Vice President Joe Biden's remarkable admission at Harvard's Kennedy School in October 2014 that "the Saudis, the emirates, etc. ... were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war ... [that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad -- except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda."
--A Times editorial just last month complaining that Saudis, Qataris and Kuwaitis were continuing to channel donations to Islamic State.
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