IBD:
In the latest edition of its propaganda rag, the Islamic State says it has enough cash to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and smuggle it into the U.S. through Mexico. This is the sum of all fears, and it’s not overblown.
The new issue of “Dabiq,” IS’ English-language webzine, includes a chilling article, “The Perfect Storm,” that claims the group has amassed enough funds to purchase a “nuclear device” from Pakistan.
“The Islamic State has billions of dollars in the bank, so they call on their wilayah (province) in Pakistan to purchase a nuclear device through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials in the region,” the magazine says. The weapon could be smuggled through drug-running routes from Islamist-controlled Nigeria to Central America to Mexico “and into the U.S.,” it adds.
Far-fetched? Not when you consider that IS has the means to buy nukes or dirty bombs, and the opportunity to smuggle them through our porous borders.
A Rand Corp. study says IS has more than $2 billion in assets from seized oil fields and refineries, kidnap ransoms and taxation. The think tank figures the terror group now controls fields with a production capacity of more than 150,000 barrels a day. It smuggles this oil out in tanker trucks and sells it at steeply discounted rates to buyers in Syria, Turkey, Kurdistan and elsewhere.
Despite falling world oil prices that have slowed IS’ energy revenues to about $2 million a week, the terror group is still raking in more than $1 million a day in extortion and taxes alone. IS has also stolen some $500 million from state-owned banks in Iraq.
This is far more cash than al-Qaida had access to before 9/11. And IS is more ambitious — and fanatical enough to actually detonate a nuke inside a U.S. city.
“ISIS has billions of dollars, and if they plan an attack from over there, it’s going to be 75% successful and larger than 9/11,” warns terror expert Jeffrey Addicott of St. Mary’s University. Indeed, IS’ magazine boasts that IS is “looking to do something big, something that would make any past operation look like a squirrel shoot.”
In March 2011, long before IS announced the creation of its caliphate, we predicted that not only would a caliphate sprout from Barack Obama’s feckless Mideast policies but that a “nuclear caliphate” would emerge.