Blowback and Gas Prices

Don't forget, IS did not spontaneously spawn.

The Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has “amassed wealth at an unprecedented pace” and is now “probably the best-funded terrorist organization” the US has confronted, according to Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, David Cohen.

[...]

Oil sales, ransoms and extortions help ISIS “generate tens of millions of dollars” monthly, the US Treasury estimates, promising to undermine the group’s finances and to impose sanctions on anyone attempting to do business with the extremists.

  RT

Pretty bold words coming from a country which left behind stockpiles of arms and old chemical weapons that IS has captured, not to mention dropped two loads of small arms in their territory that were supposedly meant for someone else.

The official specified that the IS was selling oil at lower-than-market prices to various middlemen, including those from Turkey.

“It also appears that some of the oil emanating from territory where ISIL operates has been sold to Kurds in Iraq, and then resold into Turkey,” Cohen said.

He has also lashed out at Damascus over a possibility of it cooperating with the IS.

I’ll be waiting for the leak that says US oil refineries are buying from IS – lower-than-market prices; how can they pass that up?  Is that why our gas prices are as low as $2.75 a gallon here?

“And in a further indication of the [President Bashar] Assad regime’s depravity, it seems the Syrian government has made an arrangement to purchase oil from ISIL.”

Oh, yes. The Kurds, the Turks need to stop buying, but the Syrians? They’re depraved for buying.

“The middlemen, traders, refiners, transport companies, and anyone else that handles ISIL’s oil should know that we are hard at work identifying them, and that we have tools at hand to stop them,” Cohen warned.

“We not only can cut them off from the US financial system and freeze their assets, but we can also make it very difficult for them to find a bank anywhere that will touch their money or process their transactions,’ he added.

Yes, we’re all-powerful like that.

The total profit of the extremist group was then estimated at $3 million a day by Luay al-Khatteeb, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Doha Center in Qatar.

An October report by IHS, a US-based consulting group, estimated that the IS was making up to $2 million per day, or $800 million a year, by selling oil on the black market before the US-led airstrikes.

Which is, no doubt, why IS is billed as the worst terrorists on the planet in all of history.

And in related news…how are those Russian sanctions working?

The sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and the West, among other financial blunders, are mistakes that have triggered the world to de-dollarize. Russian President Putin describes this as like “cutting down the branches, upon which they are sitting.”

Putin warned of the danger of mixing politics and economics, especially when nations are so deeply financially intertwined.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.