Marcel Winatschek

Ten Million Dollars a Day

When I can’t sleep I end up scrolling through the Arte media library, burning through documentaries until my brain finally gives up. That’s how I found IS—The Economic Power of the Holy Warriors, a piece of journalism that bypasses the usual ideological framing and asks instead: where does the money come from?

The answer is remarkable for how mundane it is. Through illegal oil trading alone—capturing Syrian and Iraqi fields and selling the crude at steep discounts to willing buyers—ISIS was generating up to ten million dollars a day. Per day. Add to that the ransoms, the taxation of occupied territories, the sale of looted antiquities, and you have something that functions less like a terrorist organization than like a state with a paramilitary wing and no interest in international law. Al-Qaeda never had this. That’s not a small distinction.

Most documentaries about jihadism get lost in theology and lineage—who declared what, which cleric authorized which act, the precise genealogy of a fatwa. This one stays economic, which makes it more frightening. Ideology can be countered with ideology. A revenue stream is harder to bomb than a building, and at ten million a day you can sustain a very long war.