Posted on 11/19/2015 4:50:03 AM PST by thackney
U.S. and coalition warplanes have launched a rapidly intensifying air campaign against the Islamic State's oil wells, refineries, and pump stations in recent days, mounting combat missions designed to incinerate tanker trucks and knock out the facilities that form the backbone of the group's oil-smuggling racket.
The air raids are meant to wreck the Islamic State's ability to profit off captured oil fields, but even if the strikes work, the extremists will have plenty of cash on hand. That's because the militant group's most important revenue stream comes not from crude oil but from extorting money from the millions of people who live under its brutal rule in territory seized in Iraq and Syria.
In July, Daniel Glaser, the assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury Department, said the Islamic State had a massive one-time cash infusion from the dozens of banks it seized in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014. The group's biggest ongoing source of money, however, comes from something quite different: extortion. Forcing the 8 million people under its thumb to pay extortion fees nets the Islamic State hundreds of millions of dollars a year, Glaser said, with the militants requiring payments for everything from garbage pickup to heating oil to road tolls.
Oil sales and smuggling ranked third, he said. That means the current U.S. air campaign -- dubbed Operation Tidal Wave II after a series of famed World War II bombing runs -- may be less effective than U.S. officials hope. President Barack Obama's administration had previously ruled out targeting tanker trucks or major parts of Syria's oil infrastructure because of the risk of causing civilian casualties and concerns about permanently destroying oil facilities that the country would eventually need once the war ended, officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
AKA taxes.
taking out their oil revenues is a starting point. A good next step would be arming and training the people that ISIS has been tyrannizing. And then it will be time for ISIS to find out what it feels like to be tyrannized.
Nothing is ever enough, so why do anything?
The point is not to stop after the first step. Not to give up already.
I can't think of a better warning than to evaporate trucks, oil, and drivers.
Break out the Daisy Cutters!
Oh, I think we ought to beat the cr@p out of them, and then continue to hit them until the end of time.
I was just presenting the perspective of the defeatist Left that’s being constantly echoed in the MSM.
I was watching video of the strike on the oil convoy and I would do things differently.
I wouldn’t worry about precision munitions targeting individual trucks. That gives guys not hit in the first strike a chance to get out of the truck and run.
I’d suggest multiple planes with cluster bombs to take out the whole convoy inside of 30 seconds so nobody gets out alive.
I think we probably have plenty of both and the mission cost would also be less expensive than surgical strikes. Daisy Cutters and cluster bombs...I like it.
Can’t stream video from here. Will play later.
We need to use less expensive and more deadly weapons. Daisy cutters, cluster bombs, diesel bombs and handing out flame throwers to Kurds like they were candy.
We treat war like gun control these days.
While we do need to take out weapons and infrastructure, the men using them are still the primary problem and those men need to be exterminated.
Yes, but hitting the oil is a very good start and will hurt them significantly.
Oil is an external source of income and is infinite. Establish a blockade of traffic into/out of the terrorists areas and taxes on the enslaved become a finite source of income.
If there is no income, there is nothing to tax.
They are strafing them with A-10s. Rather then waste high tech bombs, let the ground attack aircraft do what they do best.
Of course, when our C-I-C, and his regime, think the terrorists “have legitimate grievances with the West”, it is going to be pretty hard for our military to wage an effective campaign.
Obama’s lucky that we don’t “extoiminate” him!
“Hey, have you seen Paulie (Obama)?”...
“Nah, you won’t see him around no more.”
If a blockade was a feasible option, we could have already shut down the flow of weapons, ammunition and outside fighters.
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