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As terrorism shook the Western world in 2016, The Wall Street Journal investigated an area largely unexamined in the public furor over repeated attacks: the money trail. In a yearlong series, “Accounting for Terror,” a team of Journal reporters followed the money—in one case, literally. The stories illuminated an invisible foundation of ISIS and other terrorist groups: the economic engines that support their reign of murder and violence. The Journal obtained secret ISIS documents describing the terror group's construction of a multinational oil operation obsessed with maximizing profits. It showed how some suspects in the Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks collected welfare benefits until just before they acted. And it detailed how an iconic American food producer of Butterball turkeys has done millions of dollars of business in Africa with a company blacklisted by U.S. authorities for supporting terrorism.