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Fabrice Balanche
( €800,000 - € 1.6 million) per day.7 Crude or semi-refined oil feeds the illegal oil trade
to Iraq, Turkey and even into the area controlled by Damascus. But local consumption is
what provides Daesh with most of its revenue. Crude oil is sold to small local refineries that
provide petrol to the Syrian and Iraqi population controlled by Daesh – roughly 3 million
Syrians and 4 million Iraqis. This fuel is used for vehicles, the motorised pumps essential
for irrigation and private generators. Syrian oil production collapsed with the conflict. It
has now fallen to less than 50,000 barrels a day, having reached 380,000 barrels a day in
2011. The coalition against Daesh has bombed oil wells and local refineries, reducing
production, but to an unknown extent. There are no oil wells burning, which means that
strikes target facilities but not the wells themselves. And as the refineries are small-scale,
they are easy to re-build. These facilities are not of a comparable size with Syria’s only
official refineries at Banias and Homs. There was no official refinery in North East Syria.
In Autumn 2014, Daesh made two attempts to seize the Shaer gas fields between
Palmyra and al-Salamiyah that supply gas to the power stations at Homs and Damascus.
The aim of these raids was purely military, not financial, as Daesh has no interest in
selling gas. Raids into South West Syria indicate that the jihadi group has no intention of
remaining confined to the Euphrates valley.
The strategy of avoidance between Bashar al-Assad and Daesh
In Syria, Daesh’s number one objective is not the fall of the Assad regime, but to unify
other rebel groups under its banner. It therefore initially refrained from fighting the Syrian
army. But in summer 2014, once the last insurgents in the Euphrates valley had been
eliminated or converted, it attacked military bases at Deir ez-Zor and Raqqah, taking
control of the Tabqa military airport. Daesh fighters took a base, famous for its defences
thanks to two suicide attacks and executed 150 soldiers from the garrison.8 This traumatised
the Syrian army as state television had announced that the Tabqa airport was impregnable
only the night before. Why would Daesh want to attack the Syrian army directly? It seems
like these attacks were a response to the aerial bombardments suffered since July 2014,
although Bashar al-Assad’s air-force had avoided hitting them until that date.
This strategy of mutual avoidance allowed the Syrian opposition to accuse Bashar
al-Assad of having created Daesh to divide and discredit the uprising. It supported this
argument with the fact that Daesh’s founders were released from Syrian prisons in 2011.
The Syrian president did indeed release prisoners to calm international pressure and the
rioters in 2011. Those freed included jihadis, but these were mainly behind Ahrar al-
Sham and other fundamentalist movements – not Daesh. The Syrian security services
undoubtedly believed that freeing these activists would accelerate incipient radicalisation
and division, which could do away with the potentially dangerous moderate opposition
7 Bannier P (2015). L’État islamique et le bouleversement de l’ordre regional [The Islamic State and the
Overturning of the Regional Order] . Brussels: Editions du Cygnes, 2015.
8 Syrie: l’Etat islamique enlève le dernier bastion du régime dans la région de Rakka [Islamic State
Overturns the Régime’s Last Bastion in the Raqqah Region]. Le Monde, 24 August 2014. Available in:
regime-syrien-dans-la-region-de-rakka_4475910_3218.html