Alternately known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and Daesh (an acronym for the Arabic phrase al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham), the Islamic State emerged in 2013 from the chaotic aftermath of the USA invasion of Iraq, as an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq. AC-130s attacked with 30-millimeter Gatling guns and 105-millimeter cannons. The Pentagon says it doesn’t do body counts, but the attacks are believed to have killed upward of 20,000 IS fighters.
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WASHINGTON (AP) – In measuring progress in the American-led air war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, numbers tell one story but results tell another.
U.S.-led air strikes destroyed 116 fuel trucks operated by the Islamic State militant group in Syria on Sunday.
But a greater military effort in Syria from France, the US, and its allies, at this point, doesn’t seem to put a significant amount of oil at risk. They were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships operating out of Turkey, The NY Times reported.
The IS group has declared a self-styled caliphate in bands of territory it seized in Iraq and Syria, but has faced recent setbacks from Kurdish and Arab forces in Iraq’s Sinjar and parts of northeastern Syria.
However, Crocker voiced that any action taken by the USA should be done with caution, because even the perception that the American government is working with Russian Federation or Iran in the fight against ISIL could “turn opinions even further against us”.
The Navy also announced that the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and its battle group had departed Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia on a seven-month deployment to the Mideast to plug a gap in the US air arm that has existed since the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt left the region in September.
USA officials said that of 295 trucks in the area during the strikes, more than a third were destroyed. The U.S.is providing intelligence and targeting information to the French military to assist in their new campaign.
In the meantime, IS has leveraged Iraqi and Syrian oil resources to generate almost $1.4 million a day through black market sales. “I will not apologize for that, because we are fighting the long fight, and for us to do otherwise would be shortsighted”. Those funds have enabled the militants to replace damaged and destroyed equipment and weapons and to finance their recruiting efforts. In many cases, he said, within days of an airstrike the targeted piece of oil infrastructure was up and running again. “People would laugh, and they’d scoff, and they’d joke”, he said.
“[ISIS] got real spun up over that, saying ‘Germany didn’t mean it, they’re trying to lure you in, ‘” Crocker said.
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Airstrikes “have conjured the illusion of progress, but they have produced little in the way of decisive battlefield effects”, Sen. The details of the operations became clear when U.S. Special Forces recovered a trove of documents after killing ISIS’ top oil official, Abu Sayyaf, in a raid in May 2015.
