Three Ways ISIS Gets Its Money

Fox Nation ^ | 11-19-15 | Caroline Nyce, National Journal

[afraidfortherepublic]

Kidnappings, antiquities trafficking, and private donations.

Those are three, though certainly not the only three, of the ways that the Islamic State, or “ISIS,” the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks in Paris, funds its violent operation.

While much of its funding comes from oil sales, the group has also resorted to capturing individuals in an attempt to extract payment for their safe return. The group has kidnapped Americans and others, and in cases when payment was not made, gruesomely murdered them and released the videos on the Internet.

ISIS has kidnapped “multihundreds, if not thousands of victims,” John Cassara, a former special agent for the U.S. Treasury Department, told lawmakers on a House Foreign Affairs panel Tuesday. The group has used kidnappings to raise around $45 million in 2014, he noted, citing a Financial Action Task Force report.

“In fact, because kidnapping and associated crime, such as extortion, has been so successful, it appears the average ransom payment is increasing,” he added, describing a “vicious cycle” in which paying ransoms leads to more kidnappings, with those kidnappings in turn leading to more ransoms.

“ISIS actually makes more money off of oil sales,” testified Dr. David Andrew Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “but ransoms have helped it and alQaeda conquer that territory in the first place.”

The discussion of hostages, however, led lawmakers into a wrenching topic: whether it is wise for the United States to pay ransoms for kidnapped citizens.

[afraidfortherepublic]

I posted this article earlier, but it was so full of garbage from the glitch we have in FRee Republic software that plays games with punctuation marks that it was pulled.

VM170 kindly cleaned it up for me and I was able to find one of its sources on line and have re-posted it under that publication. Unfortunately, Fox will not allow me to post the whole thing, as I did before, but you can go to the link for the rest of it.

[tcrlaf]

With the Russians bombing the ISIS Oil Transports now, watch how the Oil Export numbers of TURKEY drops.

ISIS sells oil in Turkey for as little as $10 a barrel. Connected Turk officials are making MILLIONS off of this.

[thackney]

Replace smart quotes with regular straight quotes
http://dan.hersam.com/tools/smart-quotes.html

[House Atreides]

With the Russians bombing the ISIS Oil Transports now, watch how the Oil Export numbers of TURKEY drops.

ISIS sells oil in Turkey for as little as $10 a barrel. Connected Turk officials are making MILLIONS off of this.
*******************************************************************************
Turkey’s president, ruling party and most Turks are actually pro-ISIS. Erdogan would like to see an actual Islamic State set up with himself eventually becoming recognized as worldwide caliph IMHO.

[TurkeyLurkey]

Wonder how much UN pays them for their oil.

[Pearls Before Swine]

Turkey’s president, ruling party and most Turks are actually pro-ISIS. Erdogan would like to see an actual Islamic State set up with himself eventually becoming recognized as worldwide caliph IMHO.

Every crazy thinks he can ride the tiger (as the Chinese say). Erdogan thinks that if ISIS and other Sunni crazies cause enough trouble, he can swoop in and be Caliph of the resurrected Ottoman Empire. His buddy, Obama, might settle for being The First Black Caliph of the New World.

Meanwhile, ISIS would blow up the White Mosque in a minute, and parade Obama's head on a spike. They are all vipers. Being the King of the Snakes is a tough job.

[VMI70]

Getting rid of the “Smart Quotes” helps a lot, but almost any punctuation mark: dashes, commas, etc. needs to be converted to plain text.

[thackney]

I have not found that to be true, only occasionally are some of those items affected. I’ve not ever found it for periods or commas, some dashes and few other “exotics”.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

I’ve been putting change into the Salvation Army Red Kettles this past week. If I find out that they’re somehow involved...! j/k ;)

[cynwoody]

Getting rid of the “Smart Quotes” helps a lot, but almost any punctuation mark: dashes, commas, etc. needs to be converted to plain text.

Curly quotes and em-dashes are just the most frequent offenders. Fact is, posting anything outside the 7-bit ASCII range will exhibit the problem, unless you post the odd characters as HTML entities.

Or you can run my user scripts, for thread viewing and for posting. They both now clean up the messes locally. The posting script converts your input to entities automatically, bypassing the bug. The viewing script finds the mangled characters in the page and converts them back to what was originally intended.

[VMI70]

You’re right about the periods and commas. I think apostrophes are affected.

What I did with Afraid’s original post is went to the original National Journal article and copied and pasted it into Word, disabled “Smart Quotes”, and then did a find and replace with all the different punctuation marks, then copied and pasted that result into notepad to get everything to ASCII.
It’s a process but not arduous, and it’s obviously not perfect, but it seemed to clean up a majority of the trash.

[Spunky]

"I posted this article earlier, but it was so full of garbage from the glitch we have in FRee Republic software that plays games with punctuation marks that it was pulled."

I wondered why articles were so bad. Did JimRob change the software recently? Or what exactly is causing it?

[thackney]

Thank you