Isis is less secure financially than its propaganda would suggest, a set of recovered accounts disclose.
The files show that the group relies heavily on the expropriation of houses, cars and livestock from its citizens. Total receipts in January for the oil-rich Deir Ezzor province in eastern Syria were a modest $8,438,000 — enough to fund a terrorist group but small change for an organisation that pretends to be a state.
The documents were analysed by Aymenn al-Tamimi, an Iraqi research fellow at the Middle East Forum. The province is believed to be Isis’s most lucrative domain.
The accounts disclose, however, that 45 per cent of income came not from oil, but from “confiscation” of property and assets belonging to Isis’s opponents, including 79 houses,