It’s widely recognized that Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the terrorist group often called IS, ISIS or ISIL in the West) depends on oil sales to fuel its armies. Until recently, it’s been less clear who is buying Daesh’s oil, and how it ends up in their hands.
However, recent reports suggest that the oil flows to Europe and Asia through a complex process that implicates allies of the United States like Turkey and Israel. The U.S. is also facing increasing criticism for its failure to target the terrorist group’s oil infrastructure in a serious way until recently.
Cam Simpson and Matthew Philips, writing in November for Bloomberg Businessweek, called recent U.S. attacks on oil trucks an attempt by the Obama administration to “quietly” fix a “colossal miscalculation.” Government experts now argue that the U.S. dramatically underestimated Daesh’s oil profits:
