I have my doubts about the explanations given in the CNN article about ISIS' recent salary cuts.
CNN suggests that some of USA's recent bombings are the cause of ISIS' financial problems. Oil transports have been bombed, cutting off one source of ISIS' income, and a money depot has been bombed as well.
If this is true, then why does ISIS get into financial trouble only now? The airstrikes in Syria have been going on already since September 2014. Did the USA realize that they should start bombing oil transports only recently?
On the other hand, Russia has claimed to have been bombing oil transports since the very start of their air campaign. Which happens to have started a couple of month ago. Maybe I'm too suspicious, but to me it looks like ISIS is getting into trouble because of the recent Russian intervention, and not because the USA.
I obviously can't prove any of this since I don't have inside evidence, but my theory (explained below) is supported by a few ideas reported by the news:
1. When ISIS moves into a city they appropriate everything of value. During their initial expansion they built up quite a war chest, but their expansion has stopped for now so they are not adding funds that way.
2. ISIS makes most of its money by taxing civilians. The oil bombings are targeting the small piece of pie, not the big piece.
Here's my theory: ISIS ran into a classic problem seen by several startup companies. They saw initial success and had fast growth. They wanted to keep growing so they recruited heavily. To recruit a lot of soldiers they promised generous pay and benefits and even offered to support the families of soldiers so dads could go fight. Their burn rate was astronomical, but was okay because they were staying ahead of it through growth. But the growth ended up being unsustainable, because competition arrived and contained them. They kept it up for a long time because they had a lot of funding, but their burn rate finally caught up to them since they haven't been able to keep growing as before. Leadership did not/have not made the transition from wild startup CEOs that give pitch talks and sell to investors into the sensible, sustainable CEOs that manage a company in a saturated market with an eye toward creating a mature company. Remaining in the mode of a wild growth startup company is not an option for these guys. There is no viable strategy for a terrorist group that says "we'll grow like crazy and then sell out to Apple/Facebook/Google/Microsoft while we are popular and they'll handle the maturity stages. Terrorists have to make the maturity transition themselves because they can't be bought out.
Primarily this was to avoid unnecessary civilian and collateral damage:
"Until Monday, the United States refrained from striking the fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State’s distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact."
Plus why destroy infrastructure required by civilians during peacetime if you don't have to? That just puts them in a worse position when all this is done.
The reasons may be varied, and perhaps Russia added alot to the mix with their less discriminating bombing...
Add to that better financial tools for tracking and removing illicitly gained moneys from their coffers.
But, really, that's beside the point. The how. The important thing is the what. And that is they are getting financially squeezed.
And their pay scales allow for internal dissent since foreign fighters get paid twice the rate of their locals...
> Did the USA realize that they should start bombing oil transports only recently?
Do you want to permanently destroy Iraq's and Syria's ability to create oil?
As long as ISIS wasn't considered a major threat, there was no real reason to bomb the refineries and wells (causing permanent damage to Syria). Now that ISIS is being taken as a more serious threat, the permanent damage to Syria has been deemed acceptable.
I only doubt this theory because we civilians are not privy to strategic bombing locations. It is entirely possible that the US air campaign (or the Russians', for that matter) recently took out targets key to the financial strength of ISIS.
Russians usually target opposition forces such as Al Nusra (AQ affiliate in Syria), FSA et al and hit ISIS sites only when they want to help Assad's militias advance toward Palmyra or any other territory held currently by ISIS.
Everyone there is getting into trouble with Russian intervention. They are not fighters for the civilisation, they have their intentions and they intervened for those. The problem of middle east is a historical one, and it does not concern only the middle eastern states and people. Since WWI with the fall of the empire, the people started having identity problems, given that until the inception of the twentieth century these people lived under empires, and suddenly then they got their own states, even though there is not and was not such a great cultural divide among these countries, nor a great cultural unity within them. The western state did not work out in the proche-orient, and now we have these problems. Time is the remedy.
With regards to the oil traffic, I do not understand why we, instead of bombing, get a hold of those tankers and use that oil. Oil is precious and finite.
This actually has a pretty straight-forward answer: Russia is not afraid of collateral damage. They will bomb basically anybody, anywhere. The fact is that US/European militaries are acutely cognizant of stepping on anyone's toes. Russia is bombing everything that moves. Watch video of the oil tankers: Those jets dropped 500-pound bombs on checkpoints full of civilians just to get at the tankers. The United States military would not do that.
When you look at the picture and see the number of ISIS members that came from Europe I cannot help but wonder what language they are using internally. Quite a number of the recruits from Germany have a Turkish or German background, some in the UK a Somalian, others a Chechnyan and apparently some even an Asian (according to the pic in the article at least). I doubt that all of them are capable right from the start of speaking Arabic, so what's the command language? English? Hope so, cause that would be hilarious.
Obviously they had to read some Arabic when studying the Quran, but I doubt that would be sufficient.
On a related note, Charlie Winter published a brilliant essay on the ISIS media strategy on the BBC a couple of months ago, Fishing and ultraviolence[1]. Highly recommended.
Dude, ISIL is tiny. They only have about 40k fighters, of which the vast majority are Iraqi and Syrian. The majority of other supporters are either Arabic or Turkish speaking, and usually with Arabic as a second language.
Language is not the problem. They coordinate in Arabic, and usually if there is a Turkish or non-Arabic cell, they usually have a single Arabic speaker.
Their primary problem that ISIL has is that they lack professionals (accountants, engineers, computer scientists).
I'm absolutly uninformed on the topic. I'd guess that knowelge of (medivial) arabic is a very high priority among muslims radical enough to join IS. So I assume they use a Mix of English, German and mostly bad arabic.
I saw a documentary on this not too long ago where they had a guy embedded with ISIS. The explanation was that they'd be broken up into fighting groups by language and there'd be someone there who can speak arabic and the foreign language.
Even if they all came from Arabic-speaking countries, they would still need to select a common language. Moroccan dialects are not mutually intelligible with Arabian peninsula dialects. So they would have to revert to the older common dialect to communicate.
And that doesn't even take into account people who might speak Albanian, Armenian, French, Farsi, Kurdish, English, Pashto, Balochi, Dari, Tajik, Bengali, Russian, Urdu, or one of the Turkic languages.
Given the public image and media strategy of the group, I guess that Arabic is their common tongue, even if English would be more effective.
NPR's Planet Money recently did an episode that analyzed a 1 month budget from a Syrian province controlled by ISIS. The budget was all in USD and sounded very thorough.
Firefox has two settings to help with this problem. On the Plugins page, you can set the Flash plugin to "Ask to Activate." Firefox also provides a media.autoplay.enabled setting to prevent auto-playing HTML5 video and audio, although it is slightly buggy because websites expect media to autoplay[1].
I'm in the same boat. I suppose I'm partially living under a rock when it comes to current events, but I hadn't considered the notion of salaries for ISIS members and my first thought was that this might be from The Onion.
In biology, there is a concept of metabolic rate and its relation to life span. What if this applies to nations as well? Wartime economy means high metabolic rate, which means that the nation will be only short-lived... Was Orwell wrong when he predicted perpetual war as a way to manage dictatorship indefinitely?
1984 doesn't predict an actual perpetual war, just the believe in one. You can see this working with terrorism quite nicely. Actual attacks are rare and overall insignificant but nevertheless both parties believe themselves to be in an important war and perform actions that help reinforce each others beliefs and recruitment efforts. In reality it's really just a blood feud and will end only once one side stops participating.
How does one turn off the autoplaying video at the top right?
When i click the pause button it takes me to the video only, I just want to read the text not watch some video..
This is not uncommon behavior from groups like this or even the old Italian mob in the U.S. Doing humanitarian things like this with the locals helps buy you support and protection. Hamas has done this for years (including schools and healthcare), which helped buy it good will and even win elections.
A lot of times these groups are doing more for local populations in terms of making sure they have food and basic necessities than the government. Usually when this is happening, it's a pretty strong indictment of the official government.
It clearly shows the group's violent rhetoric and uncompromising ideology, but also illustrates that ISIS is far more than a war machine. They are trying to create a nation, and that includes civic law enforcement and social services. For many people in the conquered regions, it represents more stability than whatever was there before. Of course, there are many others who are terrorized by ISIS (typically because they do not adhere to the correct brand of religion in the correct way) but it's important to remember that there is a fair-sized contingent of civilians on the ground who welcome ISIS.
I don't think "doesn't want innocent people to starve to death" and "wants to cut off someone's head because of their religion" are mutually exclusive.
BTW, the word "state" in "Islamic State..." makes it pretty clear: they're offering state functions. Guess how modern nation-states started: killing rivals, providing security and services to populations inside their boders, establishing central cultures...
Of course ISIS needs to be smashed. But note how many nations still celebrate depraved monsters like Christopher Columbus. (Consider that when wondering why people fall for ISIS propaganda. Falling for that kind of propaganda is extremely common; we all do.)
For some time I thought money might be a reason for people to join ISIS , that they might be paying shit load of money . But it seems they are not paying much , 400$ per month is basically nothing !
In a war torn country, getting a regular paycheck every month is a privilege. They probably get multiple times the average salary in the area.
Another tidbit I heard is that in Afghanistan, many were defecting from the Taleban to Isis because the pay was higher. It seems that in some poor/rural areas, being a fighter is more a career than anything.
A day's worth of labour means a $2 pay in some third world countries. That's $60 a month, assuming you work everyday. Working for ISIS is a 6x raise, though admittedly with much higher risk.
They get to rape children. Look at the statistics over rape crimes in Europe and wonder why so many are fleeing back under the notion of "peaceful activism", as Swedish Muslim Organisations called it.
Many of them also know there won't be much evidence of their heinous crimes, so once they come back they will go scotch free as few countries have actually made ISIS illegal (as the SS became).
0. Suspected 300 returned to Sweden according to hospital treatments of war injuries.
1. 120~ actual confirmed ISIS pedophiles returned.
2. 4(?) jailed because they hade photage of themselves raping and murdering.
[+] [-] misja111|10 years ago|reply
If this is true, then why does ISIS get into financial trouble only now? The airstrikes in Syria have been going on already since September 2014. Did the USA realize that they should start bombing oil transports only recently?
On the other hand, Russia has claimed to have been bombing oil transports since the very start of their air campaign. Which happens to have started a couple of month ago. Maybe I'm too suspicious, but to me it looks like ISIS is getting into trouble because of the recent Russian intervention, and not because the USA.
[+] [-] olympus|10 years ago|reply
1. When ISIS moves into a city they appropriate everything of value. During their initial expansion they built up quite a war chest, but their expansion has stopped for now so they are not adding funds that way. 2. ISIS makes most of its money by taxing civilians. The oil bombings are targeting the small piece of pie, not the big piece.
Here's my theory: ISIS ran into a classic problem seen by several startup companies. They saw initial success and had fast growth. They wanted to keep growing so they recruited heavily. To recruit a lot of soldiers they promised generous pay and benefits and even offered to support the families of soldiers so dads could go fight. Their burn rate was astronomical, but was okay because they were staying ahead of it through growth. But the growth ended up being unsustainable, because competition arrived and contained them. They kept it up for a long time because they had a lot of funding, but their burn rate finally caught up to them since they haven't been able to keep growing as before. Leadership did not/have not made the transition from wild startup CEOs that give pitch talks and sell to investors into the sensible, sustainable CEOs that manage a company in a saturated market with an eye toward creating a mature company. Remaining in the mode of a wild growth startup company is not an option for these guys. There is no viable strategy for a terrorist group that says "we'll grow like crazy and then sell out to Apple/Facebook/Google/Microsoft while we are popular and they'll handle the maturity stages. Terrorists have to make the maturity transition themselves because they can't be bought out.
[+] [-] frotak|10 years ago|reply
Primarily this was to avoid unnecessary civilian and collateral damage:
"Until Monday, the United States refrained from striking the fleet used to transport oil, believed to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties. As a result, the Islamic State’s distribution system for exporting oil had remained largely intact."
Plus why destroy infrastructure required by civilians during peacetime if you don't have to? That just puts them in a worse position when all this is done.
[+] [-] mc32|10 years ago|reply
But, really, that's beside the point. The how. The important thing is the what. And that is they are getting financially squeezed.
And their pay scales allow for internal dissent since foreign fighters get paid twice the rate of their locals...
Good to see them make poor decisions.
[+] [-] pmorici|10 years ago|reply
http://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/footage-shows-bombi...
[+] [-] dragontamer|10 years ago|reply
Do you want to permanently destroy Iraq's and Syria's ability to create oil?
As long as ISIS wasn't considered a major threat, there was no real reason to bomb the refineries and wells (causing permanent damage to Syria). Now that ISIS is being taken as a more serious threat, the permanent damage to Syria has been deemed acceptable.
[+] [-] cbgb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkestner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gotchange|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grue3|10 years ago|reply
The key word is claimed. Like everything Putin's propaganda spews out, it couldn't be farther from the truth.
[+] [-] gkya|10 years ago|reply
With regards to the oil traffic, I do not understand why we, instead of bombing, get a hold of those tankers and use that oil. Oil is precious and finite.
[+] [-] danmaz74|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fapjacks|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sveme|10 years ago|reply
Obviously they had to read some Arabic when studying the Quran, but I doubt that would be sufficient.
On a related note, Charlie Winter published a brilliant essay on the ISIS media strategy on the BBC a couple of months ago, Fishing and ultraviolence[1]. Highly recommended.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-88492697-b674-4c69-8...
(edit: removed superfluous and)
[+] [-] 3pt14159|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_...
Language is not the problem. They coordinate in Arabic, and usually if there is a Turkish or non-Arabic cell, they usually have a single Arabic speaker.
Their primary problem that ISIL has is that they lack professionals (accountants, engineers, computer scientists).
[+] [-] beambot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1ris|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|10 years ago|reply
And that doesn't even take into account people who might speak Albanian, Armenian, French, Farsi, Kurdish, English, Pashto, Balochi, Dari, Tajik, Bengali, Russian, Urdu, or one of the Turkic languages.
Given the public image and media strategy of the group, I guess that Arabic is their common tongue, even if English would be more effective.
[+] [-] mattdanger|10 years ago|reply
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/04/458524627/episo...
[+] [-] avnfish|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldpie|10 years ago|reply
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231886
[+] [-] js2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinbartlett|10 years ago|reply
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flashcontrol/mfidm...
[+] [-] tcfunk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|10 years ago|reply
"We want revolution! But first we have to cut wages for the revolutionaries. Sorry!"
[+] [-] jpreiland|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js8|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DasIch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyfon|10 years ago|reply
This is in firefox btw.
[+] [-] js2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehartsuyker|10 years ago|reply
Honestly did not expect that. The world is more complex that portrayed.
[+] [-] pwthornton|10 years ago|reply
A lot of times these groups are doing more for local populations in terms of making sure they have food and basic necessities than the government. Usually when this is happening, it's a pretty strong indictment of the official government.
[+] [-] napoleond|10 years ago|reply
It clearly shows the group's violent rhetoric and uncompromising ideology, but also illustrates that ISIS is far more than a war machine. They are trying to create a nation, and that includes civic law enforcement and social services. For many people in the conquered regions, it represents more stability than whatever was there before. Of course, there are many others who are terrorized by ISIS (typically because they do not adhere to the correct brand of religion in the correct way) but it's important to remember that there is a fair-sized contingent of civilians on the ground who welcome ISIS.
[+] [-] static_noise|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc86|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calibraxis|10 years ago|reply
BTW, the word "state" in "Islamic State..." makes it pretty clear: they're offering state functions. Guess how modern nation-states started: killing rivals, providing security and services to populations inside their boders, establishing central cultures...
Of course ISIS needs to be smashed. But note how many nations still celebrate depraved monsters like Christopher Columbus. (Consider that when wondering why people fall for ISIS propaganda. Falling for that kind of propaganda is extremely common; we all do.)
[+] [-] CaptSpify|10 years ago|reply
Drug cartels use PR to make people loyal to them. I'd imagine ISIS is doing something relative
[+] [-] nautical|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seren|10 years ago|reply
Another tidbit I heard is that in Afghanistan, many were defecting from the Taleban to Isis because the pay was higher. It seems that in some poor/rural areas, being a fighter is more a career than anything.
[+] [-] mkaziz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seivan|10 years ago|reply
Many of them also know there won't be much evidence of their heinous crimes, so once they come back they will go scotch free as few countries have actually made ISIS illegal (as the SS became).
0: http://www.svd.se/granskning-300-svenskar-vardade-for-krigss...[+] [-] GizaDog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfologist|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pipework|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fokinsean|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randyrand|10 years ago|reply
(^took this from Reddit)
[+] [-] cm2187|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pofjer|10 years ago|reply