US Special Forces Raid Exposes Spreadsheet ISIS Accountant Behind a $1m a Day ISIS Operation

    

Documents seized in the raid that killed a top ISIS oil executive last year have revealed details on how the terror group ran its $1million-a-day oil operation.

Paperwork reviewed by the Wall Street Journal shows ISIS oil man Abu Sayyaf had a job not unlike other oil executives - except he was also faced with issues like factoring slave ownership into salary negotiations, and repairing oil wells damaged in U.S. airstrikes. 

A U.S. State Department official has said that more information was obtained from the documents seized in the raid against Abu Sayyaf than from 'any Special Forces operation in history.'

Spreadsheets retrieved in the raid showed ISIS's total natural resource revenues in the six months that ended in February 2015 amounted to $289.5 million - and Abu Sayyaf's operation in the Deir Ezzour and al-Hasakah provinces in north-eastern Syria contributed to 72 percent of those revenues, the Journal reported.

Abu Sayyaf, a Tunisian who had his headquarters in the al-Omar field in Deir Ezzour, was known as a fearsome boss, who would threaten to relocate workers to oil fields in Iraq, where bosses were thought to be even worse, said Ibrahim, a 36-year old former oil worker interviewed by the Journal.

But other means of intimidation were much more sinister, Ibrahim said:

'You go to work and you find someone beheaded.' 

Abu Sayyaf, who was given custody in September 2014 of the American aid worker Kayla Mueller after she suffered as ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's sex slave, was killed on May 16, 2015 in the nighttime raid against his compound in Deir Ezzour.  

Under the direction of ISIS, Abu Sayyaf set up a system where private buyers would line up with trucks at oil fields, pay in cash for crude oil, and transport it in their own trucks, according to the Journal.

As the Daily Beast reported in December, the truckers would then sell the crude oil at a profit to local, makeshift refineries. There, fuel was produced to be sold at roadside pumping stations or in bulk to other smugglers, who go on to sell it in more populated areas.

Dailymail