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Pakistani attorney and author Rafia Zakaria wrote an op-ed in Al Jazeera America about the Islamic extremists' war on fun, including sports, music, even dining in a fine restaurant. Zakaria points out that this apparent obsession predates the existence of ISIS by several decades (at least); he suspects this is a big reason why the attackers chose Paris, renowned worldwide for its brilliant culture and joie de vivre.
Terrorism’s targeting of the merry is universal and indiscriminate, a division of the world between those who wish to live and laugh and hope and those who kill and destroy. The latter are deadly and relentless, and they have already squeezed out the mirth from too many of the world’s cities, from Karachi, Kabul and Baghdad to Nairobi and Beirut.
Zakaria experienced this aspect of terror firsthand. A high school friend had just passed a big exam, and was out celebrating with his family at a restaurant in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists struck.
Al Jazeera America provides a separate analysis warning that military action alone cannot defeat ISIS (aka ISIL), which of course is not a "nation" in the traditional sense, but more of a guerilla outfit like Al Qaeda, that opportunistically seized a stronghold in chaotic regions of Syria and Iraq. The piece's author, political scientist Rami G. Khouri, recommends that both the West and Muslim nations of the Middle East spend more resources on addressing economic and political problems facing impoverished youths who are potentially attracted by the ISIS' recruiting pitch:
If the underlying threats to ordinary citizens’ lives in autocratic Arab-Islamic societies remain unaddressed — from jobs, water and health insurance, to free elections, a credible justice system and corruption — the flow of recruits to movements like ISIL or something even worse will persist and even accelerate.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fritsd on Monday November 16 2015, @01:29PM
In related news, I read today in de Volkskrant (http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/-terreurgroep-is-trekt-strijders-terug-uit-raqqa~a4187124/, in Dutch)
my translation:
WHO DO THEY SELL IT TO?
Who buys oil from IS?
Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper just to dismantle a multinational oil company for "aiding and abetting an enemy of humanity", and put its management in jail, rather than start bombings or even a ground war, which will lead to more hatred and slaughter and terrorism in the next generation?
Or am I not supposed to think that way...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @02:34PM
Oil is one of the most saleable commodities in the world. There are tons of nations that would buy it. If it turns out to be Exxon Mobil or Royal Dutch Shell, they should be called onto the carpet in front of TV cameras.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Monday November 16 2015, @02:48PM
Who buys oil from IS?
I follow the energy markets for a long time for investment reasons, also interested in geology; in that culture (oil investors) this is as fascinating as emacs vs vi debates in tech circles. Probably more barrels of ink have been spilled on the topic than barrels of ISIS oil sold...
Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper just to dismantle a multinational oil company
LOL, who?
The mainstream view is its just drug smuggling, but bulkier. The usual high market/discount (depending how you look at it) of up to four times. The top politicians are not directly involved but do get a cut of funds, the lower level politicians and law enforcement are bribed to look the other way.
The non mainstream view is it doesn't "seem" like it would be rocket science for the western armies to blow up enough oil tank trucks to discourage trade with neighbors, but there are concerns. First economically, firing $70K hellfires at $100K tanker trucks looks good until you look at total costs of the launching platform and the logistics tail so you end up paying $250K to make sure ISIS doesn't profit $25K or whatever and that doesn't scale or attrit very well.. Secondly most of the grunts that would end up dead would be innocent pakis or other imported labor or be locals, and nothing breeds terrorists like random killing of locals.
What would probably work is showering border guards and purchasing agents in neighboring countries with dollars, but politically thats a non starter. Most people don't really like ISIS so trading $10K of american bribe instead of $5K of ISIS bribe wouldn't be a hard sell FOR THEM, but it might be a hard sell on fox news. Meanwhile if the unemployed youth had gainful employment other than smuggling crude oil, they'd probably do an honest days work, but you can guess how fox news would propagandize that along with footage of boys in Detroit who we're not spending jobs program money on but are spending money on people we were shooting at last month over in the sandbox, etc... Its a big PITA.
On a large macroeconomic scale I have not pulled the graphs but supposedly you can estimate likely demand in Iran or Turkey or whatever and the gap is some mix of smuggling and bad estimation.
The whole oil business is an exercise in information assymetry and info warfare and plain old dealing with GIGO bad information, which makes it an interesting market to watch from the point of view of a "computer guy", or at least I think its an interesting market to watch, I'd recommend it.
Or in summary its not as simple as just throw the chairman of BP into prison, because however much he may otherwise deserve it, he has nothing to do with this.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @03:03PM
fyi paki is a derogatory term
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @06:58PM
fyi so is 'emacs'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @07:07PM
fyi so is 'fyi'
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Monday November 16 2015, @05:07PM
Your cost/benefit on blowing up oil tankers misses the point. While shooting 70K rockets (send in the worthogs and just strafe them) at them might still be a bad bargain it isn't just a dollar problem for ISIS. If we blew a bunch of them up they have to replace them. Getting oil tankers in quantity in that part of the world would be non-trivial at any price, they would certainly be forced to pay a huge premium. Second point is that those oil trucks can deliver a load every day or two so blowing one up costs ISIS a lot more than the cost of the truck or even the truck with a load. Third point is if we lower the average life expectancy of an oil tanker to a point it doesn't deliver enough loads to even pay for itself the whole black market oil business becomes a sink.
And in the end, we are rich and they aren't. So even if it cost us $2 to deny ISIS a single $1 it makes sound military sense. We put the Soviet Union out of business the exact same way, by outspending them and making them bankrupt their economy in a futile attempt to keep up. Yes they fielded advanced missiles that would have made our SDI plans much more difficult... but we never had to actually field anything because they went broke actually doing it while we were still doing R&D. Our problem is Obama. He is entirely unserious and only making a token handful of air strikes and low value targets like oil tankers aren't going to be the ones picked.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 16 2015, @06:28PM
At some scale you're probably correct, I'm just guessing that it takes a lot more than $70K MSRP of a hellfire missile to take out a tanker truck of crude. Platform limits, inevitable expensive targeting mistakes, etc.
Also they're not in the "smuggling stuff in tanker truck" business, but in the "smuggling crude oil" business. So even if we blew up every tanker truck they're just going to stack 6 drums in the back of a pickup truck and sell the load for $100 cash or whatever, plus some diesel to run the trucks. Or use boats somehow, or some form of sneakiness whereas its almost better to watch what truck goes where and then lean on the higher ups.
Note that on our own soil on heavily monitored land with massive police presence and monitoring technology our borders are pretty much wide open for illegals and drugs, so assuming we could stop crude oil exports on the other side of the planet where everyone on all sides but Israel hates us is somewhat optimistic at best.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday November 18 2015, @05:13AM
Do the math. Oil tanker trucks (per Wikipedia) carry 5500 gallons or more per load. On the typical roads over there probably tending more toward that lower bound. Break that up into barrels at about 300lbs ea and compare to the load capacity of the typical truck. If they had a lot of heavy trucks they wouldn't be mounting machine guns on crappy little Toyota light duty trucks. Even if they found enough 3/4 ton pickups they still need ten to replace one tanker. They would need a -lot- of drivers which would tie up a lot of their scarce manpower ferrying penny ante amounts of oil out. Either it won't be much money or the roads will be obviously congested with trucks, which again makes for an easy target. Traveling halfway across the area and joining ISIS to kill infidels in glorious battle and get the virgins in the afterlife is one thing, getting turned into greasy spots by the hundreds on a lonely highway trying to make a few bux is another.
And just as an I told ya so, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks somebody in Washington figured they better be seen doing something so news has broke that the UFAF took out 116 ISIS oil tankers. And as I foretold they used four warthogs along with two AC-130 gunships. This according to the NYT.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 18 2015, @02:32PM
Hmm yes scalability always a problem, you are correct in that.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anne Nonymous on Monday November 16 2015, @03:06PM
> WHO DO THEY SELL IT TO?
> Who buys oil from IS?
The FT had a good story on this very question last month: here [ft.com] and here [ft.com].
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday November 16 2015, @06:58PM
The article was fascinatingto read, but I don't believe at all the reason given why that 6 km of oil trucks wasn't bombed because "that would make life harder for the 10 million people living there if they didn't have diesel".
Now the money is flowing *into* the area, and the Daesh leaders buy more weapons and more terror attacks.
If the poor farmers have to buy diesel from *outside*, then either the money is flowing *out of* the area, draining Daesh funds, or the farmers themselves flee, draining Daesh tax income and strength (and increasing the European refugee problem, granted).
Also, we're talking about 10 million poor Syrian farmers in a desert. Since when does the Financial Times care about the poverty of Syrian farmers in a desert??? Was there ever an FT article about the Iraq war that mentioned "and the x million Iraqis in province Anbar on the other side of the Syrian border have been impoverished because X, Y and Z coalition attacks"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @03:46PM
This is it. If these bad guys have money it is because we gave it to them, paid for oil. And we're going to be doing a lot more of that in the future, it was predicted somewhere that in the next 20 years we'll be giving the Middle East 4 times more money than in the past 20 years. Imagine how life will be by then. Think about it when you grab the pistol at the gas station next time.
(Score: 2) by kbahey on Monday November 16 2015, @07:57PM
There are no multinationals here ...
Regular gasoline used to cost $2US in Turkey five years ago. Not sure what it is now, but that is more than double what it costs in, say, Canada, where I live.
What happens is that oil from ISIS is smuggled through intermediaries across the border to Turkey for less than half the international price ($20 instead of $41 or so today).
Some of that is here:
DW [dw.com]
The Economist [economist.com]
Associated Press [businessinsider.com]
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].