Reuters reports: Iraq believes Islamic State militants have stolen more than one million tonnes of grain from the country’s north and taken it to two cities they control in neighboring Syria, the agriculture minister has said.
Falah Hassan al-Zeidan said in a statement posted on the Agriculture Ministry’s website on Sunday that the government “had information about the smuggling by Islamic State gangs of more than one million tonnes of wheat and barley from Nineveh Province to the Syrian cities of Raqqa and Deir al-Zor.”
Reuters was unable to verify the information.
When Islamic State pushed from Syria into northern Iraq in June, they swiftly took over government grain silos in Nineveh and Salahadeen provinces, where about a third of Iraq’s wheat crop and nearly 40 percent of the barley crop is typically grown.
The former head of the Grain Board of Iraq told Reuters in August that Islamic State militants had seized 40,000 to 50,000 tonnes of wheat in Nineveh and the Western province of Anbar and transferred it to Syria for milling.
However, it is not known precisely how much wheat the militants seized over the summer, as they forced hundreds of thousands of people – including many farmers – off their land in what amounted to a purge of the ethnically and religiously diverse area. [Continue reading…]
This continues to be one of the most bizarre turns in modern history. In the midst of a highly militarized area, an aggregate of non-state actors seizes large amounts of territory and resources, exhibits bizarre levels of both brutality and organizational skills, makes expert use of contemporary PR techniques, and seems to be (emphasis on the seems?) as ineradicable as a fungus infection.
The moral, maybe, is that there’s a lot of empty space in any hierarchical state waiting to be disclosed, and a lot of bad actors waiting for a way to enter it. Stability — if not an illusion — appears to be quite a bit more vulnerable we like to think.