Contrary to what has been assumed so far, black market oil sales were not the only and not even the largest revenue stream for ISIS, an investigation of The New York Times has revealed. Islamic State militants have been almost entirely expelled from Iraq and Syria, but for nearly three years they had held vast territories in the Middle East because they ran those areas with two complementary tools—brutality and bureaucracy—according to the team of NYT journalists and experts who have analyzed more than 15,000 pages of internal ISIS documents found in Iraq after the terrorists were driven out. According to those documents, the Islamic State was able to hold onto vast swaths of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017 because it taxed almost every business and production under its rule, and was not trying to replace government agencies and employees, but would rather have them continue to […]