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Luay Al-Khatteeb, founder of the Iraq Energy Institute and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, estimates ISIS’s total revenue from oil production at approximately $2 million a day.

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“Put simply, ISIS is in a position to smuggle over 30,000 barrels of crude oil a day to neighbouring territories and countries at a price of between $25 to $60 per barrel depending on the number of middle-men involved,” Khatteeb wrote for Brookings.

ISIS allegedly sells much of its oil production to intermediaries in Syria, who then transport it to refineries in Turkey, Iran, and Kurdistan, Foreign Policy reported.

Put simply, ISIS is in a position to smuggle over 30,000 barrels of crude oil a day

Robin Mills, a director at Manaar Energy and author of The Myth Of The Oil Crisis, explained that individuals and nations involved in the sale of oil on the black market would be open to U.S. and EU sanctions as well as Iraqi legal action, if the state were ever to re-establish control over areas that ISIS now rules.

“The practical impact of this may not be much given the small volumes and the difficulty of tracking buyers and sellers,” Mills told Business Insider by email.

Oil isn’t the only resource that ISIS has leveraged to its advantage. In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, Brookings Doha Centre fellow Charles Lister explains how ISIS uses its control of food and water supplies to further its goals:

Money is key here. It is well-known that the IS is almost entirely self-financed. Its money comes from the control and illicit sale of oil and gas, agricultural products like wheat, the control of water and electricity and from imposing taxes within areas it controls. It is literally earning millions of dollars each week, and a great deal of this money is pumped into social services.

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