WASHINGTON, Dec 11 – The U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria has killed the group’s finance minister and two other senior leaders in air strikes in recent weeks, a U.S. military spokesman said on Thursday. Army Colonel Steve Warren told a Pentagon briefing coalition strikes had killed Abu Salah, Islamic State’s financial minister, in late November.
“He was one of the most senior and experienced members of ISIL’s financial network and he was a legacy Al Qaeda member. Salah was the third member of the finance network who had been killed in as many months. Killing him and his predecessors exhausts the knowledge and talent needed to coordinate funding within the organization,” Warren said.
According to a Brooking Institute report, Abu Salah’s real name is Muafaq Mustafa Mohammed al- Karmoush. Warren said a senior leader responsible for coordinating the group’s extortion activities and another leader who acted as an executive officer had also been killed.
The Islamic State, which the United States calls the wealthiest militant group of its kind in history, has a number of revenue streams. It has built up what amounts to a “durable and resilient financial portfolio,” funded by oil sales, extortion, and sales of antiquities, said Thomas Sanderson, an expert on terrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Recently, U.S. defense officials estimated that Islamic State was earning about $47 million per month from oil sales prior to October.
