Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

ISIS Fighters Hit With 50% Pay Cut as Air Strikes and Oil Woes Bite

The Islamic State (IS) militant group has been forced to cut its fighters’ pay by up to 50 percent because U.S.-led air strikes have had a substantial impact on the money it makes from oil, a senior U.S official said on Monday.

Daniel Glaser, assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury Department, said the strikes had hit the group’s ability to extract, refine and transport oil from territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria.

“When you look at difficulties that we know that they are having with respect to the transport, with respect to the extraction, I think it’s fair to say they are no longer able to make money the way they used to be able to,” Glaser told a London conference.

“(IS) has cut salaries to its fighters in (its de facto capital) Raqqa by up to 50 percent,” he added.

The strikes had also targeted cash storage sites which had “literally incinerated millions of dollars.”

IS has declared a self-styled caliphate across areas of territory it controls in Iraq and Syria, imposing its own harsh interpretation of Islamic law.

Glaser said the US had estimated it made some $500 million a year from oil, along with hundreds of millions more from taxation and extortion to go with the hundreds of millions it had seized from banks when it captured Iraqi towns and cities.

But the air attacks were beginning to have a major impact, he said.

This had been helped by the decision of the Iraqi government to cut off paying salaries to its employees in IS-held territory, as this amounted to some $2 billion a year.

He said IS still had a lot of money but cutting its income stream would hamper its efforts.

“It’s not cheap to run a caliphate, it’s not cheap to run a war,” Glaser said. “You need to pay your fighters. They are having a harder and harder time doing it.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.