Destroying Islamic State Finance. An Examination of the Main Economic Sanctions Against the Terrorist Organisation

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: A-, , course: International Relations, State, and Strategy, language: English, abstract: Recent news surrounding the battles in Iraq and Syria give the impression that the Islamic State is losing many of their important gains and will eventually succumb. This, however, is not the time to withdraw the pressure from the Islamic State. They still have a vast arrange of ways of collecting money from a variety of financial sources. The international community has to keep the pressure not just on the battlefield but also on the banks and assets that the Islamic State has managed to get a hold of.

It is well documented how the Islamic State was able to take and contain hold of significant amount of territories in Iraq and Syria. The failures of the Iraqi government and the uprising against the Syrian government helped lead to Islamic State victories on the battlefield. Before those battles even began, though, there was a significant amount of financial and material resources in the hands of the Islamic State.

This paper identifies how the Islamic State gets its revenues, examines the main economic sanctions that have taken place against the terrorist organization, then goes through their individual sources of revenue and analyzes what has been done and what more the international community can do in order to stop the Islamic State from taking in such large amounts of money.