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- Nov 26, 2011
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Auditing ISIS
VANEK SMITH: Mohammed Kedderer (ph) grew up in Deir ez-Zor. When ISIS invaded, he was working in an advertising agency in the city making billboards and pamphlets for local businesses.
MOHAMMED KEDDERER: It was wonderful life. I've remember that my wedding took three days.
VANEK SMITH: Your wedding took three days?
KEDDERER: Yes.
VANEK SMITH: It was a big party.
KEDDERER: Yes, a big party and it was really wonderful life.
VANEK SMITH: Mohammed is out of ISIS territory now. He spoke with us from a safe location. But he was there when ISIS took over. And he says when that happened, everything changed. ISIS took over the administration of the city. It put its own police and military in place. It killed thousands of people. Mohammed says it was horrible.
Mohammed eventually escaped and is a refugee. He escaped from his city. But he managed to smuggle out ISIS's budget.
Remember these next parts when you say you want to nuke ISIS controlled areas or when you say all Muslims are violent:
SMITH: Almost overnight, the economic picture of Mohammed's city changed. And you can see this in the secret budget that got smuggled out. The budget's for one month, from January of this year. And the total expenditure is $5,587,000 a month. ISIS is spending a lot of money in this town. But when you look at what they're spending their money on, you don't see a lot of parks or schools or libraries. What you see is that the money goes toward mostly controlling the population, to the army and to the police.
Check this out:
VANEK SMITH: What that meant for Mohammed and the other residents of Deir ez-Zor was that ISIS members were the only people in town with money to spend. And the soldiers all get paid in U.S. dollars.
KEDDERER: There are two kinds of stuff - of goods - goods for ISIS members, and there are goods for civilians.
VANEK SMITH: Mohammed says the ISIS soldiers would just throw money around in these crazy ways. He saw one guy pay $50 for a candy bar. And shop owners realized that they could charge crazy prices for things that the ISIS fighters liked. And he describes what ISIS fighters like as fancy things.
SMITH: Western-style products, especially Western-style products containing chocolate.
KEDDERER: Like a (unintelligible), like a Snickers, a Twix, that kind of fancy goods.
VANEK SMITH: Twix?
KEDDERER: A Twix, Twix...
VANEK SMITH: Like Twix bars? Like, only ISIS fighters get to eat Twix bars?
USA! USA! USA!
VANEK SMITH: And the ISIS fighters buy a lot of bigger stuff too. They like fancy cars. Mohammed says the streets of the city were lined with Dodge Chargers and Hummers and Ferraris.
SMITH: Basically, the stuff that a teenage boy might want.
VANEK SMITH: Yeah.
KEDDERER: They're asking for perfume - French perfume. They are asking for Axe spray, for (unintelligible). They're asking for...
VANEK SMITH: Axe body spray - like, Axe body spray?
KEDDERER: Yes.
Axe body spray. I can see the commercial now...
Now about that oil smuggling:
SMITH: The first big revenue line in the budget - you've probably read about this in the news - is that ISIS sells oil. Oil that used to be sold by the Syrian government is now controlled by ISIS. For the month of January, this province, Deir ez-Zor, got $2,229,000 from oil sales.
VANEK SMITH: Two-million dollars a month sounds like a lot of money. But when we talked to oil experts about this, they were surprised at how little that was. They said when ISIS first took over these oil fields, they were making way more money than that. They were smuggling huge tanker trucks outside of ISIS territory and selling it on the black market.
SMITH: But these days, it's harder for ISIS to smuggle oil over the border. The Western government's basically caught on to them. We talked with Ben Van Heuvelen. He's the managing editor of the Iraq Oil Report. And he says there has been a huge crackdown on the border. Now, instead of tanker trucks, he says a lot of it's done with long hoses that were buried under the border between ISIS territory and Turkey.
BEN VAN HEUVELEN: And then some guy on the Turkish side would sit there and suck on that big garden hose to try to siphon the gas. Another thing that people were doing is they were just strapping drums of oil to sticks and putting them on their backs and walking it over the border in areas where there weren't roads, where there wouldn't be authorities policing the border.
VANEK SMITH: They were attaching barrels of oil to sticks and, like, carrying them like Johnny Appleseed style over the border?
VAN HEUVELEN: (Laughter). Basically, yeah.
VANEK SMITH: That sounds so smalltime to me.
So how else does ISIS get income?
MITH: So we want to get through the revenue side of this budget. All told, oil and gas make out 27 percent of the income for the province. That is not nearly enough money for ISIS to keep paying its soldiers and its police. So they have a bunch of other sort of unique ways of getting money.
VANEK SMITH: And right here in the budget is a word that I have personally never seen before in a municipal budget, confiscations.
SMITH: Confiscations are 44 percent of the revenue for this ISIS province.
<snip>
SMITH: And if you want to loot in ISIS territory, you need an official permit, an official permit that you stand in line and you pay for.
CUNEO: It's a small little paper that has a stamp at the top. And then it just says, salaam alaikum, hello, you know, may God be with you. The person who carries this paper is permitted to dig for antiquities. And then it has a signature of whoever authorized it.
VANEK SMITH: And when the looter finds something, they have to declare it and pay a tax on it to ISIS.
<snip>
VANEK SMITH: Twenty-five percent of the income for ISIS in this province comes from taxing people.
SMITH: Mohammed told us all about this, and he said it was so brutal. ISIS officials would show up at your house or your office once a month and ask for money. I mean, I guess it's not asking if, basically, your life is on the line. But they demand that you give money. Mohammed said he'd get home, and they would be waiting outside his house in a car.
KEDDERER: On the first week of the month, they would start to go to the houses and jobs, and they'd take your money.
VANEK SMITH: So they would basically just show up at your door, and you'd have to hand them cash?
KEDDERER: Yes.
VANEK SMITH: Mohammed Kedderer (ph) grew up in Deir ez-Zor. When ISIS invaded, he was working in an advertising agency in the city making billboards and pamphlets for local businesses.
MOHAMMED KEDDERER: It was wonderful life. I've remember that my wedding took three days.
VANEK SMITH: Your wedding took three days?
KEDDERER: Yes.
VANEK SMITH: It was a big party.
KEDDERER: Yes, a big party and it was really wonderful life.
VANEK SMITH: Mohammed is out of ISIS territory now. He spoke with us from a safe location. But he was there when ISIS took over. And he says when that happened, everything changed. ISIS took over the administration of the city. It put its own police and military in place. It killed thousands of people. Mohammed says it was horrible.
Mohammed eventually escaped and is a refugee. He escaped from his city. But he managed to smuggle out ISIS's budget.
Remember these next parts when you say you want to nuke ISIS controlled areas or when you say all Muslims are violent:
SMITH: Almost overnight, the economic picture of Mohammed's city changed. And you can see this in the secret budget that got smuggled out. The budget's for one month, from January of this year. And the total expenditure is $5,587,000 a month. ISIS is spending a lot of money in this town. But when you look at what they're spending their money on, you don't see a lot of parks or schools or libraries. What you see is that the money goes toward mostly controlling the population, to the army and to the police.
Check this out:
VANEK SMITH: What that meant for Mohammed and the other residents of Deir ez-Zor was that ISIS members were the only people in town with money to spend. And the soldiers all get paid in U.S. dollars.
KEDDERER: There are two kinds of stuff - of goods - goods for ISIS members, and there are goods for civilians.
VANEK SMITH: Mohammed says the ISIS soldiers would just throw money around in these crazy ways. He saw one guy pay $50 for a candy bar. And shop owners realized that they could charge crazy prices for things that the ISIS fighters liked. And he describes what ISIS fighters like as fancy things.
SMITH: Western-style products, especially Western-style products containing chocolate.
KEDDERER: Like a (unintelligible), like a Snickers, a Twix, that kind of fancy goods.
VANEK SMITH: Twix?
KEDDERER: A Twix, Twix...
VANEK SMITH: Like Twix bars? Like, only ISIS fighters get to eat Twix bars?
USA! USA! USA!
VANEK SMITH: And the ISIS fighters buy a lot of bigger stuff too. They like fancy cars. Mohammed says the streets of the city were lined with Dodge Chargers and Hummers and Ferraris.
SMITH: Basically, the stuff that a teenage boy might want.
VANEK SMITH: Yeah.
KEDDERER: They're asking for perfume - French perfume. They are asking for Axe spray, for (unintelligible). They're asking for...
VANEK SMITH: Axe body spray - like, Axe body spray?
KEDDERER: Yes.
Axe body spray. I can see the commercial now...
Now about that oil smuggling:
SMITH: The first big revenue line in the budget - you've probably read about this in the news - is that ISIS sells oil. Oil that used to be sold by the Syrian government is now controlled by ISIS. For the month of January, this province, Deir ez-Zor, got $2,229,000 from oil sales.
VANEK SMITH: Two-million dollars a month sounds like a lot of money. But when we talked to oil experts about this, they were surprised at how little that was. They said when ISIS first took over these oil fields, they were making way more money than that. They were smuggling huge tanker trucks outside of ISIS territory and selling it on the black market.
SMITH: But these days, it's harder for ISIS to smuggle oil over the border. The Western government's basically caught on to them. We talked with Ben Van Heuvelen. He's the managing editor of the Iraq Oil Report. And he says there has been a huge crackdown on the border. Now, instead of tanker trucks, he says a lot of it's done with long hoses that were buried under the border between ISIS territory and Turkey.
BEN VAN HEUVELEN: And then some guy on the Turkish side would sit there and suck on that big garden hose to try to siphon the gas. Another thing that people were doing is they were just strapping drums of oil to sticks and putting them on their backs and walking it over the border in areas where there weren't roads, where there wouldn't be authorities policing the border.
VANEK SMITH: They were attaching barrels of oil to sticks and, like, carrying them like Johnny Appleseed style over the border?
VAN HEUVELEN: (Laughter). Basically, yeah.
VANEK SMITH: That sounds so smalltime to me.
So how else does ISIS get income?
MITH: So we want to get through the revenue side of this budget. All told, oil and gas make out 27 percent of the income for the province. That is not nearly enough money for ISIS to keep paying its soldiers and its police. So they have a bunch of other sort of unique ways of getting money.
VANEK SMITH: And right here in the budget is a word that I have personally never seen before in a municipal budget, confiscations.
SMITH: Confiscations are 44 percent of the revenue for this ISIS province.
<snip>
SMITH: And if you want to loot in ISIS territory, you need an official permit, an official permit that you stand in line and you pay for.
CUNEO: It's a small little paper that has a stamp at the top. And then it just says, salaam alaikum, hello, you know, may God be with you. The person who carries this paper is permitted to dig for antiquities. And then it has a signature of whoever authorized it.
VANEK SMITH: And when the looter finds something, they have to declare it and pay a tax on it to ISIS.
<snip>
VANEK SMITH: Twenty-five percent of the income for ISIS in this province comes from taxing people.
SMITH: Mohammed told us all about this, and he said it was so brutal. ISIS officials would show up at your house or your office once a month and ask for money. I mean, I guess it's not asking if, basically, your life is on the line. But they demand that you give money. Mohammed said he'd get home, and they would be waiting outside his house in a car.
KEDDERER: On the first week of the month, they would start to go to the houses and jobs, and they'd take your money.
VANEK SMITH: So they would basically just show up at your door, and you'd have to hand them cash?
KEDDERER: Yes.
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