Despite heavy U.S. airstrikes, IS threat persists

“Everything that we’re doing carries a timeline attached to it”, the official said.

Currently, ISIS pulls in around $50 million a month in revenue from oil and is forced to sell product at a deeply discounted price.

They also discussed how a hostile attitude towards Syrian refugees could strengthen negative opinions of the U.S.in the Middle East, to the benefit of the Islamic State.

US aircraft have destroyed 116 fuel trucks used by ISIS to generate income for its operations, which is part of an expansion of the U.S.-led coalition’s targeting of ISIS’ oil-smuggling operations.

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.

The airstrikes were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships based in Turkey. Selling oil for somewhere between $20 and $45 per barrel may generate up to $1.5 million per day in revenues for the militant group.

“The people feel that they are in a large prison and that at any moment there could be a battle for Raqqa or preparatory airstrikes where they will be the biggest losers”, said Tim Ramadan, an activist with Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a campaign group that opposes Isis and the Syrian regime. 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.

It should be noted that the attacks are not a direct response to the Paris attacks on Friday, which ISIS has taken credit for. On November 2, they hit 3 cranes, two construction vehicles, an oil pump and a pump truck.

But in a stepped up effort, the US military has launched a campaign called Tidal Wave II, named after the operation to take out Romanian oil fields during World War II to hinder Nazi Germany.

The oil smuggling business is a source of an estimated daily revenue of United States dollars 1.0 M for the jihadist organization, which uses the proceeds from illegal oil sales to fund its military operations and recruit fighters.

“They’re probably just civilians”, Warren said. In a word, stalemate, although US military officials say they see the tide gradually turning in their favor. “We’ve done a very comprehensive analysis of these facilities to determine which pieces of the facility we can strike that will shut that facility down for a fairly extended period of time”.

“What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them”.

The overall campaign against oil infrastructure, dubbed Operation Tidal Wave II, is about 70 percent complete, Warren said.