Posted on 11/17/2015 5:24:06 AM PST by thackney
American military officials have come to the conclusion that the U.S.-led air campaign targeting Syria’s oil infrastructure — which has provided the Islamic State with hundreds of millions of dollars over the past two years — has been too cautious. A new offensive aims to change that.
Officials would not say if the rules of engagement for the U.S.-led air war against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have changed to allow for a new and more aggressive round of strikes. But there was little doubt that the U.S. aerial assault that tore through 116 ISIS oil tankers parked near an Iraqi border crossing Sunday night signaled that the militant group’s financial infrastructure was now squarely in American crosshairs.
In the early days of the campaign last September, American officials made a point to say that the Islamic State’s mobile oil drilling assets were high on the target list, but a Pentagon spokesman said on Monday that the coalition has actually been trying to spare some of Syria’s largest oil producing facilities.
The coalition has been conscious of the “degree of damage we want to do to these things, recognizing that they remain the property of the Syrian people,†said Capt. Jeff Davis. But as the war has dragged on, and ISIS continues to pull in anywhere from $1 to $2 million a day from its black market oil smuggling operations, that thinking appears to have changed. As well-supplied ISIS fighters stubbornly hold out in cities like Raqqa, Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi, and the group begins to conduct operations as far away as Egypt, Afghanistan, and Paris, military planners have decided to expand their target lists. “We have gone after them more aggressively,†Davis said.
This month, the coalition has launched over a dozen airstrikes...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Sounds like President Trump is already influencing policy.
Great.... but WHY was this not the course of action from Day One????
(Never mind... I know the answer — it’s that mulatto thing sitting in the WH...)
Why weren’t they hit a year ago?
This month, the coalition has launched over a dozen airstrikes...
I think I see the problem...
It’s a shame that Russia had to force the US into action!
because US blacks would vote for him anyway, but now an election is approaching and it’s looking like Trump could win, so it’s time to play tuff again!
47% would vote for him anyways.
That sentence continues to be specific target, not the air strikes in the entire country.
I was nearing the excerpt limit.
The question is will Obama permit the gloves to come off or will he overrule the military?
US airstrikes destroy over 100 Daesh oil trucks
http://www.albawaba.com/news/us-airstrikes-destroy-over-100-daesh-oil-trucks-769038
The United States military has ramped up its offensives against Daesh in Syria, taking out scores of militant trucks during an aerial raid in the Arab country’s east, according to the New York Times.
The US Daily said Monday that American warplanes attacked hundreds of Daesh trucks earlier in the day. The extremist group has been using the trucks to smuggle the crude oil it has been producing in Syria.
Citing US officials, the NY Times said an initial assessment showed 116 trucks were destroyed in the attack, which took place near Deir al-Zour, an area controlled by Daesh militants close to Syria’s eastern border with Iraq.
The airstrikes were carried out by four A-10 attack planes and two AC-130 gunships based in Turkey, the paper added.
It said plans for the strike were developed well before the Daesh attacks in and around France’s capital city on Friday, and that the assault is part of a broader operation to disrupt Daesh’s ability to fund its terror offensives.
Daesh is said to generate as much as $40 million a month by producing and exporting oil it steals from the areas under its control.
The report said until Monday, the US had refrained from striking the Daesh oil fleet, which is estimated to include more than 1,000 tanker trucks, because of concerns about causing civilian casualties.
It noted that the new campaign is called ‘Tidal Wave II,’ named after the World War II effort to counter Nazi Germany by striking Romania’s oil industry.
According to the New York Times, which cited an unnamed US military official, a number of tactics were used to reduce the risk of harming civilians. Two F-15s dropped leaflets about an hour before the attack warning drivers to abandon their vehicles.
The area where the trucks assembled in Syria has been closely monitored by US reconnaissance drones. As many as 1,000 trucks have been observed there, waiting to receive their cargo of illicit oil, the report said, adding that at the time of the attack, 295 trucks were in the area, and more than one-third of them were destroyed.
The A-10s dropped two dozen 500-pound bombs and conducted strafing runs with 30-millimeter Gatling guns. The AC-130s attacked with 30-millimeter Gatling guns and 105-millimeter cannons.
This was Trump’s idea
Its about time. And this time their will be no press cameras crews and "journalists" wailing and moaning about "a highway of death" to stop it.
Why were the gloves ever ON?
Yahoo: quick, let’s do a “Gloves Coming Off” article to impress the sheeple how tough Obama Bin Laden is on those nasty terrorists.
The US military almost certainly had plans to attack this oil revenue capability for some time. Absent, of course, was Obama regime approval for these attacks to degrade the ISIS financial infrastructure.
Obama, in addition to holding off EFFECTIVE attacks against ISIS due to his (and his & Hillary’s Muslim Brotherhood connected associates’) pro-Muslim leanings, also held off in deference to his Islamist friends in the Turkish President Erdogan’s regime. Erdogan and Turkish have substantial black-market petroleum dealings with ISIS.
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