In Raqqa’s downtown markets, bearded, rifle-toting foreigners seemed at times to outnumber locals as the ISIS occupation took on a look of permanence. The group’s coffers were fattening quickly, between the fees and bribes assessed to businesses and the sale of more than forty thousand barrels of crude oil per day from oil wells captured by ISIS in its march across the Syrian desert. The jihadists who had been so anxious to capture Raqqa a few months earlier seemed in no hurry now to push on to further conquests, Abu Ibrahim noted. The Islamic State’s men would turn aggressive whenever there
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