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Iraq’s Insurgency Runs on Stolen Oil Profits
[Quote:]
Five years after the war in Iraq began, the insurgency remains a lethal force. The steady flow of cash is one reason, even as the American troop buildup and the recruitment of former insurgents to American-backed militias have helped push the number of attacks down to 2005 levels.
In fact, money, far more than jihadist ideology, is a crucial motivation for a majority of Sunni insurgents, according to American officers in some Sunni provinces and other military officials in Iraq who have reviewed detainee surveys and other intelligence on the insurgency.
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“It has a great deal more to do with the economy than with ideology,” said one senior American military official, who said that studies of detainees in American custody found that about three-quarters were not committed to the jihadist ideology. “The vast majority have nothing to do with the caliphate and the central ideology of Al Qaeda.”
The corruption that drives money to the insurgency is hardly limited to the Baiji refinery, which a reporter visited last month. In Mosul, for example, insurgents have skimmed profits from soda and cement factories, American officers said.
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Most theft occurs outside the refinery, but fraud still abounds inside, too. At one refinery office, a broken control-room machine has a hole where an object has been jammed through the glass to stop a dial from turning. Most everything is recorded using paper, and tubes of correction fluid sit on the desks of clerks overseeing the flow of fuel. It is regularly used to cover up huge discrepancies in production and distribution tallies that soldiers say can only be explained by theft.
“We’d all be hanged” if the refinery had operated this way under Mr. Hussein’s government, one senior refinery official confided to American soldiers.
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Last year, a new Iraqi Army brigade commander, Col. Yaseen Taha Rajeeb, was assigned to the refinery. He helped stop some of the most blatant theft. But the colonel’s paychecks were stopped soon after he began cracking down, and he was fired this year.
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Even Saddam used to find that his countrymen were nigh on ungovernable. It’s an act of extreme folly for the new “authorities” to imagine otherwise. Fools.