Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria

[jpak]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/retreating-isis-army-smuggled-a-fortune-in-cash-and-gold-out-of-iraq-and-syria/2018/12/21/95087ffc-054b-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.43a24b2c457f

IRBIL, Iraq — More than a year after the collapse of its self-declared caliphate, the Islamic State is sitting on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations and ensure the organization’s survival years into the future, intelligence officials and terrorism experts say.

As the Islamist militants retreated from former strongholds in Iraq and Syria, they carried vast sums in Western and Iraqi currency and gold coins — a trove estimated by independent experts to total about $400 million — nearly all of it looted from banks or acquired through criminal enterprises.

While some of this treasure was buried or hidden away, the group’s leaders have laundered tens of millions of dollars by investing in legitimate businesses throughout the Middle East over the past year, the officials said. The money is partly intended, analysts say, to fund a future resurgence of the Islamic State, a prospect that some experts fear could be hastened by the rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria announced by the Trump administration this week.

New insights into the group’s financial holdings have emerged from raids in recent weeks on businesses in Baghdad and Irbil, in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish province. Investigators traced the flow of millions of dollars in Islamic State revenue through banking networks with links to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates as well as Iraq and Syria.

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Did they bribe Trump with it?

[monmouth4]

1. I wonder what red don's cut was..n/t