Pentagon targeting trucks, rigs in assault on Islamic State oil funding

Fighter jets, bombers, attack planes and drones are dropping an average of 2,228 bombs per month on targets ranging from training camps and machine gun positions to oil facilities and weapons shacks. Estimates range as high as $1 million a day. The U.S.is providing intelligence and targeting information to the French military to assist in their new campaign.

But what has been the result?

Most often refined in Syria, the group’s oil is trucked to cities such as Mosul to provide people living under its black banner with fuel for generators and other basic needs.

The key word is “gradually”. Unlike many terrorist groups, which finance themselves mainly through wealthy donors, the Islamic State has used its control over a territory that is roughly the size of the United Kingdom and home to millions of people to develop diversified revenue channels that make it more resilient to USA offensives.

As NPR’s Deborah Amos reported in July, the group controls 80 percent of Syria’s pre-war oil.

This summer, concerned that cash flowing through the Iraqi banking system might still be ending up in ISIS accounts, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve temporarily suspended transfers to Iraq’s central banks, according to The Wall Street Journal.

How has it managed this?

“What we found out was that many of our strikes were only minimally effective”.

The premise of this strategy, endorsed by the president’s national security advisers but doubted by many in Congress, is that although the USA military is capable of squashing IS, any such victory would be short-lived without local armies and governments capable of maintaining stability.

In northern Syria, the United States has deployed special operations forces to work with Kurdish militias and their Arab partners to fight ISIS.

“Again, we have to be cognizant that there will be a time after the war – the war will end”, he added. The US says that it has refrained from aggressively striking these convoys – which could consist of more than 1,000 fuel tanker trucks – out of a concern over civilian casualties.

“We have to understand that the Muslim nations in the region – Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, all of these nations – they’re going to just have to get their hands dirty, their boots on the ground”, Sanders said at the event at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, the first caucus state in the primary season. Yet even if the USA finally weakens the group’s oil income, Bahney and other analysts in the US, the Middle East, and Europe contend, Islamic State has resources beyond crude-from selling sex slaves to ransoming hostages to plundering stolen farmland-that can likely keep it fighting for years. The goal, he said, was to destroy machinery or facilities for which the militants don’t have the needed replacement parts. Critics of the administration’s approach say this is giving IS too much breathing room, enabling it to spread its influence well beyond Syria and Iraq.

In recent days the Pentagon has highlighted attacks on oil-related targets that it previously had passed up or struck too lightly.

“This is one of the sad realities”, he said.

FOREIGN FIGHTERS: a few foreign fighters who travel to join the Islamic State bring with them hard currency – though this appears to be a relatively limited funding source for the Islamic State.

In the wake of the attacks, Western leaders have alluded of the need for a cohesive multilateral military and political effort to defeat ISIS.