An intensifying campaign of U.S. air strikes on the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) has nearly shut down its oil operations in Iraq and has hampered its more lucrative business in Syria, eroding the group’s largest source of financing and threatening its ability to govern territory. Iraq Oil Report has compiled a comprehensive history of the IS oil sector based on the organization’s own records, details of which have just been declassified by the U.S. government and are being published here for the first time. Those accounts have been broadly corroborated by the first-hand testimony of residents and oil workers in IS-occupied territory. They show that, until recently, nearly 2,000 IS oil workers, many recruited from abroad, were able […]