Trump, ISIS and Iraqi Oil

Jan 27, 2017 | Eugene Kiely
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President Donald Trump claimed that the Islamic State, or ISIS, would not exist if the U.S. “kept the oil when we got out” of Iraq. In fact, ISIS largely has been funded through extortion, robbery, taxes and Syrian oil, according to government reports and terrorism financing experts.

“Trump is absolutely correct that oil sales have been a critical part of ISIS’s revenue stream since at least early 2014, but he’s wrong that an ongoing American occupation of the Iraqi oilfields would have bankrupted ISIS,” Peter Harrell, the deputy assistant secretary for Counter Threat Finance and Sanctions in the State Department under President Obama, told us in an email. “If you look at the facts on the ground ISIS has likely always produced more oil in Syria than in Iraq.”