Here comes yet another body blow for the reeling auto industry. Toyota has been put on the spot by the US government, which has asked the Japanese car maker to explain just how Islamic State has got hold of hundreds of its four-wheel-drive vehicles.
The Toyota Hilux pickup — a model similar to the Toyota Tacoma sold in the US — and Toyota Land Cruisers have become fixtures in the terror group’s propaganda videos, according to media reports late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
“Regrettably, the Toyota Land Cruiser and Hilux have effectively become almost part of the ISIS brand,” said one former US ambassador to the UN, Mark Wallace, quoted in an ABC News report.
Wallace is currently chief executive for the Counter Extremism Project, which aims to expose terrorists’ financial networks. “I don’t think Toyota’s trying to intentionally profit from it, but they are on notice now and they should do more,” Wallace added.
Questions about ISIS’s use of the vehicles have circulated for years, with the terror group believed to have repurposed older Toyota trucks as well as acquiring hundreds of new vehicles. In a recent ISIS parade, more than two-thirds of the vehicles were white Toyotas with black emblems, and there also were small numbers of other brands such as Mitsubishi, Hyundai and Isuzu.
The Twitterverse is cracking jokes about the situation, of course. Some have resurfaced a parody ad (“Toyota ISIS: We’re good for jihad!”), produced earlier this year by The Blaze, a conservative news outlet:
Others are pointing out that there actually is a minivan model called the Toyota Isis.
For its part, Toyota says it’s “supporting” the investigation by US counter-terrorism officials, and it has a policy not to sell vehicles to buyers who might use them for paramilitary or terrorist activities, a CNN report says. Toyota has said it doesn’t know how ISIS obtained the pickups and SUVs, and it’s impossible for the company to track vehicles that have been bought and then resold by middlemen or stolen, media reports say.
This article originally appeared on Marketwatch.
