ISIS has also gained hundreds of thousands, if not millions, as ransom from the families, businesses or governments of its kidnapping victims. While the US and Britain maintain staunch ‘no payment of ransom’ positions and have seen numerous US and British nationals killed by ISIS (as well as by other extremist organizations), various European, Asian, and other countries – both governments and companies – have brought their people home after quietly paying ransoms generally far lower than those demanded for American or British citizens.
Then there is the massive funding, by some reports second only to oil income, accruing to ISIS from sales of plundered ancient artifacts, putting the historical legacy of Syria and to some degree Iraq at even greater risk. The human rights section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science took satellite images in 2014 that, according to a scholar on the project, ‘show the destruction of ancient artifacts, architecture, and most importantly, archaeological context that is the record of humanity’s past. From the origins of civilization to the first international empires, Syria’s cultural heritage and these sites in particular are vitally important to our understanding of history.’ Some of those looted artifacts are being sold to collectors and dealers in the US. According to a February 2015 Wall Street Journal investigation, ‘in the US alone, government data show the value of declared antiques imported from Syria jumped 134 per cent in 2013 to $11 million. US officials estimate the value of undeclared pieces is many multiples higher.’
And ISIS is not the only force threatening Syria’s cultural treasure. The Journal article reports that ‘video published by a Syrian opposition media network on YouTube shows soldiers fighting for President Bashar al-Assad ’s regime at Palmyra with delicate grave reliefs loaded onto a truck. And senior Free Syrian Army fighters, the secular opposition that has received aid from the US, have long conceded to Western media that looting antiquities is an important source of funding.’
In early 2015, the United Nations Security Council passed a series of resolutions aimed at choking off sources of funding for ISIS as well as other extremist organizations including the al-Nusra Front. The Council condemned the purchase of oil from those organizations. But although it passed the resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which can authorize the use of force, it did little to bring real pressure on the global oil market to stop the trade, threatening only to send any violators to the UN Sanctions Committee for possible listing as a violator of UN sanctions. It called on all UN member states to freeze the assets of people who commit terrorist acts, and to ‘take appropriate steps to prevent the trade in Iraqi and Syrian cultural property and other items of… historical, cultural, rare scientific and religious importance illegally removed from Iraq since 6 August 1990 [when the first resolution aimed at protecting Iraqi cultural heritage was passed] and from Syria since 15 March 2011.’ The resolution also reaffirmed that payment of ransom to any organization on the UN’s al-Qaeda sanctions list, regardless of who pays, would be considered a violation of international legal obligations.
Then there is the politically embarrassing (for the US, at least) source of some of the most crucial funding for ISIS – important because it provides political and military as well as direct financial support. That source is the US-backed, US-armed petro-monarchies of the Arab Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar and beyond.
Writing in CounterPunch in February 2015, Patrick Cockburn reported that ISIS
is still receiving significant financial support from Arab sympathizers outside Iraq and Syria, enabling it to expand its war effort, says a senior Kurdish official. The US has been trying to stop such private donors in the Gulf oil states sending to Islamic State (ISIS) funds that help pay the salaries of fighters who may number well over 100,000. Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish President, Massoud Barzani, told The Independent on Sunday: ‘There is sympathy for Da’esh [ISIS] in many Arab countries and this has translated into money – and that is a disaster.’ … Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran member of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership who recently retired from the Iraqi parliament, said there was a misunderstanding as to why Gulf countries paid off IS. It is not only that donors are supporters of IS, but that the movement ‘gets money from the Arab countries because they are afraid of it,’ he says. ‘Gulf countries give money to Da’esh so that it promises not to carry out operations on their territory.’
Some of the most extensive reports are of direct funding of ISIS (as well as of the plethora of extreme Islamist organizations that preceded it) by Saudi Arabia, though the exact combination of government funds, state-linked institutional funds, donations from individual princes within the vast royal family, and contributions from wealthy individuals and businesses in the kingdom remains murky. This isn’t a new, or an ISIS-specific phenomenon. As Patrick Cockburn notes in his book The Jihadis Return:
In 2009, eight years after 9/11, a cable from the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, revealed by WikiLeaks, complained that donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. But despite this private admission, the US and Western Europeans continued to remain indifferent to Saudi preachers whose message, spread to millions by satellite TV, YouTube and Twitter, called for the killing of the Shi’a as heretics. These calls came as al-Qaeda bombs were slaughtering people in Shi’a neighborhoods in Iraq. A sub-headline in another State Department cable in the same year reads: ‘Saudi Arabia: Anti-Shi’ism As Foreign Policy?’ Now, five years later, Saudi-supported groups have a record of extreme sectarianism against non-Sunni Muslims.’
The US knew, but despite it all, the Saudi monarchy – known for its tight control over its own population – remained a key Washington ally.
There was of course a long history of Saudi funding of Islamic extremists in official and unacknowledged partnerships with the US. During the 1980s it was Saudi money that paid for the Afghan mujahideen warriors, trained and backed by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence services, who battled Soviet-backed forces at Washington’s behest at the height of Reagan’s Cold War. There are countless reports of Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks themselves, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens; the storied 28-page section of the official 9/11 report, which remains fully redacted and unavailable to the public, allegedly details some of that involvement. The focus on that potential scandal had waned in recent years. But it gained new prominence with the sudden announcement in February 2015 that al-Qaeda operative and so-called 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, serving a life sentence in a US prison, had testified in a related trial about the powerful Saudi princes who had funded bin Laden’s and others’ terrorist actions. He named names, including Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the US; influential billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal; and many of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful clerics. All the princes (though probably not the imams) had long experience in and with the US, some in close relationships at the highest levels of US government.
Other regional leaders have been even more direct in holding the Gulf monarchies responsible for the rise in extremism. US-backed Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki, in March 2014, blamed Saudi Arabia and Qatar. As quoted by Patrick Cockburn in The Jihadis Return, Maliki told an interviewer that ‘these two countries are primarily responsible for the sectarian, terrorist and security crisis in Iraq.’ While part of his goal was to deflect his government’s own responsibility for its sectarian, anti-Sunni repression, Maliki went on to say that the two governments were also ‘buying weapons for the benefit of these terrorist organizations.’ According to Cockburn, ‘there was considerable truth in Maliki’s charges.’
Such allegations are consistent with longstanding and now public US government unease over funding of terrorists coming from the Gulf states allied to the US. When The Guardian and other outlets were releasing the huge trove of WikiLeaks cables in 2009-10, one set dealt directly with US concerns about Saudi and other Gulf states’ funding of Islamist extremists, in the years when ISIS was still functioning as al-Qaeda in Iraq and as the Islamic State of Iraq.
According to The Guardian:
Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such