Bloomberg quotes Rafik Hariri Center Resident Fellow Faysal Itani on sources of funding for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham:
Oil is essential to funding Islamic State’s military endeavours. The terrorist group is stuck with high overhead. It has to repair equipment and maintain the salaries it pays fighters. According to Faysal Itani, a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Centre for the Middle East, Islamic State pays its roughly 25,000 fighters about $400 a month each, almost triple what competing Syrian rebel groups pay. Itani says Islamic State’s ambitions to create a caliphate have left it vulnerable. “If you’re going to act like a state, you can be taken down like one,” he says. “Draining their oil revenues will eventually start to hurt their ability to attract those fence-sitters out there who are not ideological.”