Saudi funding and ISIS: a response to John Ross
As a contribution to the case against bombing Syria, John Ross of Socialist Action has posted a short piece entitled “How to really defeat ISIS”.
This consists of two proposals — first, that “Turkey should be told it must close within 24 hours the main supply route across its border to ISIS” and, second, that “Saudi Arabia should be told it must cease all transfers of money to ISIS”. Both the Turkish and Saudi governments should be subjected to financial sanctions by the UN if they fail to comply with these demands.
John claims: “If these measures are adopted they would, unlike Cameron’s bombing, lead to the crushing of ISIS.” Is this in fact the case? Let’s examine John’s proposal that Saudi Arabia should be forced to block transfers of money to ISIS.
A 2014 study from the Washington Institute states:
There is a misconception that the kingdom does not get in the way of private Saudi financing of terrorist groups operating in Syria, including ISIS. Yet one of Riyadh’s most observable counter-terrorism financing activities is its monitoring of the country’s formal financial sector in order to block suspect donations. Indeed, social media fundraising campaigns highlight the challenges of sending such funds from Saudi Arabia to Syria. To ensure that their contributions actually reach Syria, Saudi donors are encouraged to send their money to Kuwait, long considered one of the most permissive terrorism financing environments in the Persian Gulf.
Nevertheless, the Washington Institute does argue that “Riyadh could do much more to limit private funding”.
So, let’s assume that Riyadh did crack down even more heavily on private Saudi funding for ISIS, and managed to block all such donations. Would that inflict any serious damage on ISIS’s finances?
The answer is clearly no. ISIS is overwhelmingly self-financing and always has been.
Here is a detailed analysis from McClatchy DC of documents containing Daesh’s financial records for the period 2005–2010 (in 2005 it was still al-Qaeda in Iraq):
The documents also challenge popular narratives about the group, including that Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries were key contributors to the birth of ISIS…. In fact, the intercepted documents show, outside donations amounted to only a tiny fraction — no more than 5 percent — of the group’s operating budgets from 2005 until 2010….
Charles Lister, who researches extremist groups as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center in Qatar, said there was no evidence that foreign donors such as Gulf nations became any more important to the group after 2010; he dismissed that idea as stemming from a “political context of deep suspicion and paranoia”.
According to some estimates, ISIS has an income of $1.5 million a day from oil sales. Charles Lister thinks this figure could well be an exaggeration, but he adds: “ISIS may be earning as much as $600 million annually by levying a 50 percent tax on government-paid employees, a 3 to 5 percent tax on all local businesses and a tax of between 10 and 15 percent on all commercial trucks passing through its territory.”
No Saudi donor could provide anything approaching that level of funding.
The Financial Action Task Force published a study of Daesh’s funding earlier this year, which confirmed Lister’s view. It found that “the overall quantitative value of external donations to ISIL is minimal relative to its other revenue sources”.
Even if ISIS were deprived of all its external sources of financial support, it is obvious this would have no significant impact on its ability to function. John Ross’s assertion that an end to Saudi funding would “lead to the crushing of ISIS” therefore lacks any basis in reality.
Unfortunately, whatever their intention, ill-researched arguments like this just undermine the case for opposing military intervention.
