HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:
BBC reports that the US Air Force has
conducted air strikes targeting ISIS's stores of money destroying up to $800 million in cash [bbc.com] which has contributed to a 90% jump in defections and a drop in new arrivals. US intelligence indicated the group's cash troubles had led it to start selling vehicles to make money, says Maj Gen Gersten, the deputy commander for operations and intelligence for the US-led operation against IS. In January, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that IS announced it was to cut fighters' salaries in half "because of the exceptional circumstances that the Islamic State is passing through". In one case, Gersten says, an estimated $150 million was destroyed from the air at a house in Mosul, Iraq after forces fighting IS received intelligence indicating in which room of the house money was stored. But according to Patrick Wintour writing in The Guardian, these assertions are
hard to verify, and could be seen as self-delusion, propaganda or disinformation [theguardian.com] – all designed to reassure public opinion that Isis is being slowly degraded. However the claims chime with documentary evidence published by researchers in the counter-terrorism journal CTC Sentinel, showing that Isis is
struggling to fund its fighters, which make up about 60% of the group’s costs [usma.edu]. Likening the anti-Isis coalition’s efforts to financially weaken the Isis base to the economic warfare waged against Nazi Germany during the second world war, individuals including Air Vice-Marshal Edward Stringer have come to regard efforts to understand, and undermine, the group’s funding as equally important to military gains. “Isis is trying to get more hard cash through extortion of the local population,” says Stringer . “We are starting to see corruption and embezzlement among senior leaders, suggesting we are having success.”
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