Dr. Nader Hashemi:

It is a good question. Early this year, President Obama called ISIS the junior varsity, JV, team of al-Qaeda. He did not pay much attention to it, and this was not his personal view but what his intelligence services were telling him. The general view is that nobody predicted that ISIS would emerge into the fighting force it has become. It has been a surprise to many people watching events in Iraq to see a group that had formed and announced itself only in 2013 dominating approximately 81,000 sq. m. of real estate, approximately the size of Great Britain, in the heart of the Middle East. It has been a shock to many people and was unpredictable. One explanation for the success of ISIS is that there is nobody to stand against them. The existing states in Iraq and Syria have withered away. There is much Sunni disgruntlement and disillusionment, which has produced support for ISIS in these parts of the Middle East. The good news is that the world has finally woken up to the fact that it cannot ignore the rise of ISIS and that it is not just a Middle East problem but a global problem. There has been a major intelligence failure, but one of which everybody is guilty because nobody saw it coming.

One of the reasons ISIS has been successful is because it has captured a number of Syrian oil fields and has sold oil on the black market, giving it a revenue source. The other major source of funding that has been widely reported is the money that is being given by private charities in the Gulf region. There is a lot of money in the Gulf area, and many people with rich, deep pockets, and they have been a major source of financial support for ISIS. That private money comes largely from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Although it is often misreported in the media that the Saudi and Qatari Governments are supporting ISIS, there is no evidence to support it. Private money has been a major reason ISIS has been so successful. It can pay its fighters more generous monthly stipends to keep them loyal compared to other groups, and this must change if we want to help change the battlefield conditions in Iraq and Syria.