"The ISIS Files" Meant to Obscure

The New York Times has published a long story by Rukmini Callimachi called "The ISIS Files." Callimachi, as part of a larger group which included West Point analysts, tracked down documents abandoned by the Islamic State in Iraq.

One of the main takeaways for readers of The Times is

Contrary to popular perception, the group was self-financed, not dependent on external donors.

[snip] 

But perhaps the most lucrative tax was a religious tax known as zakat, which is considered one of the five pillars of Islam. It is calculated at 2.5 percent of an individual’s assets, and up to 10 percent for agricultural production, according to Ms. Revkin, the Yale researcher. While some of these fees had been charged by the Iraqi and Syrian governments, the mandatory asset tax was a new development.

Ordinarily in Islamic practice, the zakat is a tithe used to help the poor. In the Islamic State’s interpretation, an act of charity became a mandatory payment, and while some of the funds collected were used to help needy families, the Ministry of Zakat and Charities acted more like a version of the Internal Revenue Service.

Most accounts of how the Islamic State became the richest terrorist group in the world focus on its black-market oil sales, which at one point brought in as much as $2 million per week, according to some estimates. Yet records recovered in Syria by Mr. Tamimi and analyzed by Ms. Revkin show that the ratio of money earned from taxes versus oil stood at 6:1.

Callimachi's profusion of words provides zero insight into who led ISIS --

The disheveled fighters who burst out of the desert more than three years ago founded a state that was acknowledged by no one except themselves. And yet for nearly three years, the Islamic State controlled a stretch of land that at one point was the size of Britain, with a population estimated at 12 million people. At its peak, it included a 100-mile coastline in Libya, a section of Nigeria’s lawless forests and a city in the Philippines, as well as colonies in at least 13 other countries. By far the largest city under their rule was Mosul.

We are told that ISIS co-opted the existing state bureaucracy, ruled by violence and terror (which produced surprisingly good public services) and practiced religious cleansing whereby land of the Shia and the Christian was seized and transferred to the caliphate -- and everything was taxed, down to a single grain of wheat.

But where is a description of the amazing "disheveled fighters who burst out of the desert" to accomplish Alexander-the-Great-like logistical feats? That's the story. Who did this? Where did they come from?

We get zero of that, which should make a reader very suspicious.

The caliphate, in all its complexity and the Blitzkrieg-like speed with which it sprang up, could only have been erected by a state actor.

If I wanted to obscure the foreign source of its capital what better way to do it than with dummy tax receipts?

Callimachi goes out of her way to say the documents are legit. The guys from West Point said so.