October 7, 2015, - 5:20 pm
Why Does ISIS Have So Many Toyota Trucks? & Why Won’t Toyota Stop It?
I’ve been out for the last two days in observance of the last of the Jewish holidays, this month, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. But an interesting story came up in my absence. If you’ve watched the many videos of ISIS convoys driving through the various towns the Islamic terrorist group has taken, you’ve probably noticed that ISIS drives trucks from one brand: Toyota. But if you haven’t noticed, the feds and other Western law enforcement authorities have noticed. And if you notice a Sunni Muslim buying a Toyota truck to be shipped overseas, you should definitely take notice. Here’s why . . . .
Not only does ISIS prefer Toyota trucks, particularly HiLux pickup trucks and Land Cruiser SUVs, but it is apparently asking ISIS supporters to purchase those trucks for the group. Oh, and by the way, you sent ’em some of those trucks, too, courtesy of the U.S. State Department and its aid to “non-extremist” Muslim rebels, including the Free Syrian Army, who either gave them to ISIS when they defected to the group, or who had their Toyota HiLuxes taken when ISIS captured and/or killed them.
The feds are seeking assistance from Toyota to help track who is buying the trucks, but Toyota isn’t really helping and is pleading ignorance, saying it has already told dealerships in the Middle East not to sell to terrorists. But I think we all know that these dealerships, most of them in Sunni countries, know exactly where the trucks are going, but with a wink and a nod–cha-ching!–the sale is made. The dealerships not only make money on the sales, but they help their Sunni brethren in the jihad.
More:
U.S. counter-terror officials have asked Toyota, the world’s second largest auto maker, to help them determine how ISIS has managed to acquire the large number of Toyota pick-up trucks and SUVs seen prominently in the terror group’s propaganda videos in Iraq, Syria and Libya, ABC News has learned. Toyota says it does not know how ISIS obtained the vehicles and is “supporting” the inquiry led by the Terror Financing unit of the Treasury Department — part of a broad U.S. effort to prevent Western-made goods from ending up in the hands of the terror group. . . .
Toyota has a “strict policy to not sell vehicles to potential purchasers who may use or modify them for paramilitary or terrorist activities,” Lewis said. He said it is impossible for the company to track vehicles that have been stolen, or have been bought and re-sold by middlemen.
Toyota Hilux pickups, an overseas model similar to the Toyota Tacoma, and Toyota Land Cruisers have become fixtures in videos of the ISIS campaign in Iraq, Syria and Libya, with their truck beds loaded with heavy weapons and cabs jammed with terrorists. The Iraqi Ambassador to the United States, Lukman Faily, told ABC News that in addition to re-purposing older trucks, his government believes ISIS has acquired “hundreds” of “brand new” Toyotas in recent years.
“This is a question we’ve been asking our neighbors,” Faily said. “How could these brand new trucks… these four wheel drives, hundreds of them — where are they coming from?”
ISIS propaganda videos show gunmen patrolling Syrian streets in what appear to be older and newer model white Hilux pick-ups bearing the black caliphate seal and crossing Libya in long caravans of gleaming tan Toyota Land Cruisers. When ISIS soldiers paraded through the center of Raqqa, more than two-thirds of the vehicles were the familiar white Toyotas with the black emblems. There were small numbers of other brands including Mitsubishi, Hyundai and Isuzu.
“Regrettably, the Toyota Land Cruiser and Hilux have effectively become almost part of the ISIS brand,” said Mark Wallace, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who is CEO of the Counter Extremism Project, a non-profit working to expose the financial support networks of terror groups. “ISIS has used these vehicles in order to engage in military-type activities, terror activities, and the like,” Wallace told ABC News. “But in nearly every ISIS video, they show a fleet — a convoy of Toyota vehicles and that’s very concerning to us.”
Toyota says many of the vehicles seen in ISIS videos are not recent models. “We have procedures in place to help ensure our products are not diverted for unauthorized military use,” said [Ed] Lewis, [a top American]Toyota executive. But, Lewis added, “It is impossible for Toyota to completely control indirect or illegal channels through which our vehicles could be misappropriated.”
Questions about the ISIS use of Toyota vehicles have circulated for years. In 2014, a report by the radio broadcaster Public Radio International noted that the U.S. State Department delivered 43 Toyota trucks to Syrian rebels. A more recent report in an Australian newspaper said that more than 800 of the trucks had been reported missing in Sydney between 2014 and 2015, and quoted terror experts speculating that they may have been exported to ISIS territory.
Attempts to track the path of the trucks into ISIS hands has proven complicated for U.S. and Iraqi officials. Toyota’s own figures show sales of Hilux and Land Cruisers tripling from 6,000 sold in Iraq in 2011 to 18,000 sold in 2013, before sales dropped back to 13,000 in 2014. Brigadier General Saad Maan, an Iraqi military spokesman, told ABC News he suspects that middlemen from outside Iraq have been smuggling the trucks into his country. . . .
Toyota distributors in the region contacted by ABC News said they did not know how the trucks reached ISIS. Sumitomo, a Japanese conglomerate that ships vehicles to the region, wrote to ABC News, “In terms of how anyone operating outside of the law obtain vehicles for misappropriation, we have no way to know and therefore cannot comment.”
Riiiight. They can track them, but they don’t want to. It’s bad for biz. They’d rather triple their sales than shrink them geometrically.
Wallace, of the Counter Extremism Project, said his organization wrote directly to Toyota earlier this year to urge the company to do more to track the flow of trucks to ISIS, and noted that the trucks are stamped with traceable identification numbers. “I don’t think Toyota’s trying to intentionally profit from it, but they are on notice now and they should do more,” Wallace said. “They should be able to figure it out… how are these trucks getting there. I think they should disclose that, put a stop to that, and put policies and procedures in places that are real and effective to make sure that we don’t see videos of ISIS using Toyota trucks in the future.”
Good luck with that. It won’t happen until Japan experiences domestic terrorist attacks perpetrated by ISIS. And that ain’t happening soon. We in the U.S. and Europe are ISIS’ top targets outside the Middle East.
Watch the video report at ABC News (it does not include embedding code, so I cannot post it here).
Hmmm . . . in a weird coincidence, Toyota makes a car called the Isis. Maybe it’s time to stop production on it. It’s definitely well past time for Toyota to crack down on those selling its trucks to ISIS and friends.
BTW, while it took the feds a while to discover that ISIS has a mysterious ability to get so many Toyota trucks and is only now investigating, some smart aleck discovered it over a year ago and posted the video below on YouTube, then.
Tags: auto news, car news, cars, ISIS, ISIS Toyota, Official truck of ISIS, Toyota, Toyota Hilux, Toyota Hilux ISIS
Hmmm… instead of stopping shipment of these cars, why not equip them with hidden tracking units…
If you’re so sure these Toyotas are bought by ISIS supporters, and sent to ISIS, that’s the way to track and eliminate hidden targets…
hmmm on October 7, 2015 at 5:44 pm