U.S. Treasury Official: ISIS Made Over $500 Million From Oil Sales

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Daesh or ISIS militants have earned more than $500 million selling oil, a senior U.S. Treasury official said last week. Significant volumes have been sold to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and some to Turkey, Reuters reported.

Earnings from oil trading are a major source for the militant group to finance its rule and attacks abroad. U.S. Treasury Department official Adam Szubin said militants were selling as much as $40 million a month of oil at the installations which was then spirited on trucks across the battlelines of the Syrian civil war and sometimes further.

"ISIL is selling a great deal of oil to the Assad regime,"  Reuters quoted Szubin, acting under secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence with the Treasury. "The two are trying to slaughter each other and they are still engaged in millions and millions of dollars of trade”.

He pointed out that a significant amount of Islamic State oil ends up under Assad's control while some is consumed internally in ISIS-held territory. Some ends up in Kurdish regions and some in Turkey.

"Our sense is that ISIL is taking its profits basically at the wellhead and so while you do have ISIL oil ending up in a variety of different places that's not really the pressure we want when it comes to stemming the flow of funding - it really comes down to taking down their infrastructure," Szubin said.

Whether the estimate of $40 million a month could be multiplied over a year, is uncertain at the moment, he said. Without revealing a definite time period, Szubin said that IS State had made over $500 million from the oil trade.

"It's not just a financial issue - it is about foreign terrorist flows, it's about weapons and it's about financing. I think securing that border would pay major dividends in terms of intensifying the pressure and also reducing the threat”, he added.

Reuters reported that the son of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has denied Russian allegations that he and his family were profiting from the illegal smuggling of oil from ISIS-controlled areas.