A noticeable share of the humanitarian aid that the U.S. and other Western countries are sending to Syria is being skimmed or interecepted by the Islamic State, Jamie Dettmer of the Daily Beast reports from Turkey. Aid agencies that want to get food, medicine, and other supplies into Islamic State–controlled territory in Syria (usually from Turkey) essentially have to pay a tax to the jihadist group for access or see some of the goods taken from them. That enriches the Islamic State directly, and indirectly, experts point out to Dettmer, the Islamic State gets to worry a little less about caring for the civilians in its territory.
That’s all correct, but it’s worth noting that this is essentially an ineluctable issue that crops up in conflict zones all across the globe — the U.S. and Western donors may be more squeamish about inadvertently financing the Islamic State than they are, say, Congolese rebels or Hamas, but if you want to help the innocent people under the thumb of an inhumane regime, said regime ends up getting a cut. The fact that this is a big problem in Syria also underscores a depressing reality about the Islamic State: It controls huge swaths of Syrian territory and is essentially governing them, in a way that no other single rebel group in Syria has been able to. (There are small bits of the country under the control of Kurdish fighters.) The Islamic State controls perhaps as much as about a third of Syria’s geographic area, although one-third of Syrians don’t live in that territory.
There is some suggestion in the piece that curtailing or shutting off aid could turn the population against the Islamic State, making it impossible for the group to keep holding territory. This is a possibility, raised in the piece by Foundation for the Defense of Democracies fellow Jonathan Schanzer, but it’s not clear it would definitely work: The Islamic State rules at least as much by terror as it does by having won over hearts and minds.