ISIS Earns $800 Million Per Year Selling Oil to Black Market

It might not be well equipped on how to operate the oil fields it has seized in northern Iraq and Syria, but the ISIS is nonetheless earning $800 million per year by selling those oil in the black market, according to estimates released by IHS.

Worth noting is that the radical group is even believed to have been selling those precious oil at lower costs or half the official price on the black market before it got bombarded by the airstrikes launched by the US-led coalition. On a daily basis, the ISIS was earning a whopping $2 million.

The ISIS' aggressive campaign has enabled it to control as much as 350,000 barrels per day in pre-war capacity in Iraq and Syria. Its limited technological know-how on how to maximise its loot, however, makes it only able to come up between 50,000 and 60,000 barrels per day. IHS said the actual amount of production varies per day because of "warfare, shut-ins and ISIL's limited technical prowess operating the fields."

Of those actual produced, ISIS uses up the half to sustain its campaign. The other half it sells at between $25 and $60 a barrel, which is half the $85 per barrel set by Dated Brent, the international benchmark.

Those marked for sell-off are moved in trucks along smuggling routes on the Turkish border, Jordan or Iraq, IHS said.

Even if the airstrikes did manage to suspend or affect the ISIS' oil production, Bhushan Bahree, a co-author of the report, told Bloomberg the group still is filthy rich. "For argument's sake, let's say their capacity was cut by half. They'll still have $400 million coming in. This is many times more than any other source of funding we know of," Bahree said.

Oil fuels ISIS' war machine, IHS said. So it would be impossible to say the group will just all together abandon its main source of income every time it gets bombarded by airstrikes. "Oil directly finances ISIL's myriad activities and encourages the activities of middlemen who sell, transport and export the oil and thus have a vested interest in ISIL."

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