To start, preventing cultural heritage to come into the hands of Islamic State could cause economic setbacks for IS. IS makes profits through several ways, like taxes and fees from the people under their regime, natural resources like oil, foreign donations, but also from selling antiquities they obtained from cultural heritage sites (Heißner et al. 2017, 7). In Turkey alone, which shares a border with IS territory, the authorities caught 6,800 objects from  2011 to 2016 that came from cultural heritage sites and where being smuggles across the border to be sold (Myers and Kulish, 2016). Estimates show that the profits IS makes from selling looted antiquities vary millions to hundreds of millions of dollars on a yearly base (Vlasic and Turku 2016, 1177). Also, in “The Islamic State’s symbolic war: Da’esh’s socially mediated terrorism as a threat to cultural heritage” Smith et al. state that internal profits, like looted antiquities, made by IS are essential for the continuation and survival of IS, as they can be used for the costs IS makes (Smith et al. 2016, 179-80). As IS makes profits from selling antiquities obtained from cultural heritage sites, preventing IS to lay hand on these cultural heritage sites will thus cause a financial setback for IS, affecting the chances of IS surviving. Furthermore, data found in a collaborative research in 2017 conducted by EY and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, which is part of King’s College London, shows that although the share of antiquities is at the bottom of profit shares made by IS, with profits made from oil leading the list (Heißner et al. 2017, 8), the financials of IS are already in decline (Heißner et al. 2017, 10), which suggests that any profit made, even if it is not that much, is very valuable for IS. It was estimated that the overall income of IS decreased by approximately 50 percent in just two years from 1.9 billion dollars in 2014 to 870 million dollars in 2016 (Heißner et al. 2017, 10). This was mainly because of loss of in territory which resulted in less natural resources to sell, and fewer people and businesses to receive taxes from. Also, some actions taken by the Global Coalition to reduce Islamic State’s financial income have had some influence like actions taken at the border of IS’s territory to counter smuggling and Operation Tidal Wave II which was launched in 2015 which permitted attacking oil transportation lines and cash depots (Heißner et al. 2017, 12). Furthermore, IS has so far not succeeded to come up with new sources of funding that would replace the losses that have been made lately (Heißner et al. 2017, 5). The study suggests that if IS continues down the same path, their ‘”business model”’ will not last for long (Heißner et al. 2017, 3).  main topic sentence

Another argument supporting the claim that preventing cultural heritage sites to fall into the hands of IS will help in the fight against them is that IS will lose a way to express their power and ideology on a global scale and recruit new members. Besides the fact that they do this because The emergence of social media brought a new way of terrorism into being. In “The Islamic State’s symbolic war: Da’esh’s socia