The Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) revealed on Tuesday that the Islamic State (IS) militant group seized a total of 825 million U.S. dollars when they captured the predominantly Sunni provinces in northern and western Iraq in 2014.
In a statement, the CBI said that the terrorist group in June 2014 seized 121 branches of the government-owned and private banks, including the CBI branch in Mosul.
Most of these amounts of money IS seized from banks were deposits belonging to government departments' and the provincial governments' allocations for the annual 2014 budget, it added.
The extremist IS organization has also gained large amounts of money since June 2014, according to the statement which showed that the IS group's income amounted to two billion dollars annually, making it one of the richest extremist organizations at the time.
The daily revenues of the group from the illegal oil selling from oil fields in Iraq and Syria amounted to about two million dollars for the sale of 30,000 barrels per day, with the price of a barrel ranged between 25-50 dollars before the drop in oil prices in the past, the statement said without saying who was buying the oil that IS group stole and smuggled.
The extremist IS group made a significant blitzkrieg and seized large territories in the predominantly Sunni provinces in northern and western Iraq in June 2014, after the government forces abandoned their weapons and fled.
On the other hand, Iraq's bond market return will not be a cakewalk for investors. Buyers piled into the war-torn country's first issue of a fixed-income security in a decade. With emerging market debt squeezed by low rates, fund managers have little choice but to take a risk.
Iraq sounds like a sticky investment proposition. Its debt is already more than 60 percent of economic output, and its fiscal deficit was 14 percent of GDP last year. The economy is almost entirely dependent on oil, and an unfinished civil war with Islamic State could cause the country to fragment. Yet investors placed orders for more than six times the $1 billionIraq was seeking to raise.