Politics to go: Jeff Dunetz

ISIS is not your father’s terrorist organization

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ISIS is different from other terrorist groups but perhaps not in the same way it is being reported. Some say it is unprecedented in its level of violence, pointing out that its leaders were thrown out of al Qaeda for being too violent. That is a special kind of crazy. Truth is they weren’t thrown out for being to violent but for not submitting themselves to the al Qaeda leadership.

Certainly ISIS is a violent group, but so is al Qaeda whose public beheading of Daniel Pearl was just as horrific as the beheading of Foley and Sotloff, as is the Palestinian attack on the Fogel family, or the Hamas murder of three Israeli boys earlier this summer.

What really makes ISIS different is that it is more of a single operation, unlike Al Qaeda, which had a core group, surrounded by many “franchise” terrorist groups. As a single entity the “Islamic State,” or whatever they are calling themselves today, has been able to develop a self-sustaining economy, that among other things, makes it the richest terrorist group ever, and able to fund a lot more evil than other terrorists.

ISIS has taken over large swaths of both Iraq and Syria, and closing in on Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon and eventually Israel. Everywhere it goes it raises money through extortion, oil pirating and kidnapping. This is significant because one of the ways free nations fight terrorists is cutting off their money supply. Since ISIS has its own money, that would be a much more difficult task to accomplish.

On Aug. 28, the Wall Street Journal outlined the emerging financial empire being built by the vicious terrorist group. It is building a self-sustaining economy across the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, by pirating oil and exacting tribute from a native population of at least eight million people.

Pretty soon Qatar won’t be lying when it says it doesn’t help fund ISIS.

Meanwhile, the nations trying to stop ISIS are worried that a clampdown on economic activity that helps fund the group could cause a humanitarian crisis in the already stressed areas it controls.

“Can you prevent ISIS from taking assets? Not really, because they’re sitting on a lot of assets already,” said a Western counterterrorism official. “So you must disrupt the network of trade. But if you disrupt trade in commodities like food, for example, then you risk starving thousands of civilians.”

ISIS controls some oil fields in Syria and Iraq and is selling the oil at distressed rates.

They sell heavy oil at an average of $26 to $35 a barrel to local merchants, to merchants across the border in Iraq, or to upstart refineries financed by Turkish, Lebanese and Iraqi businessmen, according to Syrians and Lebanese involved in the oil trade.

Along with the oil money, ISIS terrorists have implemented an orderly extortion system of business and farm tributes, public-transport fees and protection payments from non-Sunni Muslims who choose to live under the militants rather than flee.

ISIS also gets a large slice of its operating income from kidnapping ransoms. While the U.S. doesn’t pay ransom, Europe does and has for a long time. In fact, Islamist terror from the days of Yasser Arafat through ISIS today, was suckled on the teat of European financial appeasement and European and U.S. political appeasement.

The “Islamic State” does its homework and that helps them strong-arm the locals into turning over their assets.

Earlier this year, as Islamic State militants swarmed northern Syria, one farming family got a knock on the door that would strip them of their livelihoods.

The militants, who introduced themselves as Islamic State members, said they were administering the town and had a list of how many acres of land and other assets the family owned, said one family member. They also said they had a list of the town’s Christian families and the tribute they had to pay to be able to stay living there.

“They demanded to be paid in gold, silver or any other precious material for the annual crop we were about to plant,” said the family member, who has since fled. He said farmers were forced to pay tribute based on land in their possession rather than the success of their crop — a hardship, coming in a drought year.

Not only do they have the cash, but they also have the passports. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers explained the problem on the Hugh Hewitt program last week.

“Qaeda pre-9/11 … didn’t have access to the Western passport holders. They had to get pretty creative about how they were going to try to infiltrate people in to get on airplanes in the United States. So imagine, if you have a whole cadre of individuals now that have American passports, or British passports, or German passports, any other waiver country, which means you don’t have to apply for a visa, so it doesn’t get the same kind of scrutiny that you might get from other countries of interest, you know, somebody from Pakistan, for instance [has] to apply for a visa and it’s a whole process to make sure that … extremists from the tribal areas aren’t trying to infiltrate the United States. None of that happens. And so this makes it much more difficult, and much more easy for them to try to plan attacks in the Western world.”

It seems that after his “no strategy” (which was more of a gaffe than a statement of fact) President Obama seems to be getting more serious about the terrorist organization, but he still doesn’t understand what he is up against. When he spoke of ISIS he talked about shrinking and managing the terrorist organization.

These are evil barbarians; they can’t be negotiated with nor can they be managed. They need to be defeated and destroyed. Our Commander-in-Chief, who is the leader of the free world, needs to be very clear about those objectives, and the objective needs to be victory not management.

Keep in mind though, unlike the case of our entry into Iraq eleven years ago, ISIS threatens the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for all Americans here at home and overseas. If President Obama cannot put together an alliance where other nations are the lead boots on the ground, America may have to send more Americans into Iraq and Syria (we already have special forces troops on the ground).

In the end, the first priority of a national government is protecting its citizens and a war against ISIS would not be an optional war. ISIS isn’t lying when they announce their intention to hit us here in the U.S.