Speaking yesterday before the
Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and later at the
White
House Press Briefing, Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial
Intelligence
David
Cohen outlined Treasury’s role within the comprehensive U.S. and
international effort to disrupt, degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL. He
discussed Treasury’s continuing work, under President Obama’s leadership and
together with partners around the world, to deploy innovative tools to
undermine ISIL’s financial strength.
Under Secretary Cohen described Treasury’s strategy, which
involves three mutually supportive elements:
·
Working to disrupt ISIL’s main revenue sources
-- oil sales, kidnapping for ransom, extortion and crime, and donations
-- in order to deny it money in the first place.
·
Limiting what ISIL can do with the funds it
collects by restricting its access to the international financial system.
·
Continuing to impose sanctions on ISIL’s senior
leadership and financial facilitators to disrupt their ability to operate.
Highlights from his speech include:
“In
many respects, our campaign against ISIL’s financial foundation will build on
our work over the past ten years…But to some extent, ISIL poses a different
terrorist financing challenge. It has amassed wealth at an unprecedented
pace, and its revenue sources have a different composition from those of many
other terrorist organizations. So, just as ISIL relies in part on new models to
fund itself, we too are adapting our tools and techniques to combat ISIL’s
financial activities.”
“To disrupt the market in oil derived from
ISIL-controlled fields, we will target for financial sanctions anyone who
trades in ISIL’s stolen oil. It is true, of course, that ISIL’s oil moves
in illicit networks that are largely outside the formal economy, where
individuals are less vulnerable to financial pressure. But at some point,
that oil is acquired by someone who operates in the legitimate economy and who
makes use of the financial system. He has a bank account. His
business may be financed, his trucks may be insured, his facilities may be
licensed. All that makes ISIL oil facilitators vulnerable. The middlemen,
traders, refiners, transport companies, and anyone else that handles ISIL’s oil
should know that we are hard at work identifying them, and that we have tools
at hand to stop them. We not only can cut them off from the U.S. financial
system and freeze their assets, but we can also make it very difficult for them
to find a bank anywhere that will touch their money or process their
transactions. In combating ISIL’s fundraising through oil sales, we will
leverage the well-established reluctance of banks around the world to
facilitate the financing of terrorism.”
“We should not confuse funding with financial
strength. While ISIL today is well-funded, a terrorist group’s overall
financial strength turns not just on its income, but also on its expenses and,
importantly, the degree to which it can dedicate its resources to violent
purposes. And in that regard, ISIL operates within certain real
constraints.”
“I must stress…that the campaign against ISIL’s finances
will require more than just financial tools. This is primarily because,
given that ISIL is enriching itself locally, cutting off one key source of
funds will require dislodging it from territory in which it operates. But
more broadly, even as this vital military campaign progresses, we recognize that
the only solutions to the conflicts in Iraq and Syria are political in
nature. The hateful ideology propagated by ISIL must be countered by
tolerant, economically vibrant societies and governments that rule in an
inclusive manner. These are long term goals that the United States is
deeply committed to fostering.”
Review the entirety of his speech and discussion at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP): prepared
remarks and full-length broadcast.
Learn
more about Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
Hagar Chemali is the spokesperson for Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.