Baghdad used to be the most important route for smuggled US dollars but it has become more difficult to bring cash in this way after military operations were launched against the IS group in the Samarra Island area.
“The other source of smuggled US dollars now is Iraqi Kurdistan,” Salman told NIQASH. “Erbil and Dohuk in particular – and the money passes through the Mosul Dam area to get here.”
Syrian merchants who travel into Iraq via territory controlled by the IS group also bring US dollars into Mosul.
“The IS group is making around an extra 20 percent from all this money exchange,” another former banker still living in Mosul told NIQASH. All of the organization’s revenues tend to come in US dollars – sales out of factories it controls, profits from businesses, taxes it levies and fines for crimes. But as an employer – after all, the IS group run their territory as bureaucratically as a small, tyrannical government – the extremists also have to pay all of their staff, those working in healthcare or on street maintenance, for example. And they make the salary payments using Iraqi dinars.
So they get to double dip because they control the sources of cash, making extra revenue when people are forced to change dollars into dinars, or vice versa.
Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the result of all of this wheeling and dealing is that the current master of Mosul’s money markets is the US dollar, followed by those worn out Iraqi dinars. As for the IS group’s legendary golden dinar, that everybody in Mosul got sick of hearing about, well, that isn’t being mentioned by anyone anymore.
*Names of individuals still in Mosul, or with families still in Mosul, have been changed for security reasons.
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