Strike two in Syria as RAF jets and drones hit more oilfields

During the evening of December 4, Tornado GR4s and Typhoon FGR4s, based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, conducted a further series of strikes on targets in the very large IS-controlled oilfield at Omar in eastern Syria, MoD said on Saturday in a statement.

It is instructive that its first air strikes were directed against ISIS oil extraction and refining installations, which provide the terrorist group with most of its revenue.

Bombing began hours after MPs gave their backing for military action, with the oil fields, which are in eastern Syria, targeted.

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“We are going to use force against them in the headquarters, their command and control, their logistics, but also in the infrastructure that supports them”, he told the Press Association.

Mr Fallon said there were no reports of civilian casualties following the strikes.

The Ministry of Defence said the deployment of the Typhoons plus an extra two Tornados offered a significant increase in strike capacity to both the RAF and the wider coalition air campaign.

The British contribution still forms only a tiny part of U.S.-led “Operation Inherent Resolve”, which has been bombing Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria for more than a year with hundreds of aircraft.

Across the border in Iraq, an unmanned RAF Reaper drone – flying close support for Kurdish peshmerga ground forces – destroyed an IS truck bomb with a direct hit from a Hellfire missile, the MoD said.

“Plumes of smoke are still rising from the area”, the activist group Deir Ezzor is Being Slaughtered Silently said earlier today. The US-led coalition, which Britain has joined, has in recent weeks and months increasingly targeted Isis oil facilities to stem the lucrative black market trade.

Bashar Assad’s regime, meanwhile, has denounced the mission as “noise and propaganda”, claiming that any country that does not co-ordinate its attacks with the government “won’t win the fight against terrorism”.

German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier described the situation as “too risky, and freedom and stability too fragile, for us to counter each other” – an apparent reference to the spat caused by the downing of a Russian plane by Turkey.