The Islamic State extremist group starts the new year with a drastically depleted bank account, counterterrorism officials say, after months of intensified efforts to deprive the militants of oil profits and other revenue used to finance military operations and terrorists attacks abroad.
Coalition aircraft in the past 15 months have destroyed more than 1,200 tanker trucks -- including 168 vehicles struck in a single air raid in Syria in early December -- while also using new weapons and tactics to inflict lasting damage on the terrorists' remaining oil fields, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials say.
The military strikes are being paired with new measures intended to shut down financial networks used by the Islamic State to procure supplies and pay its fighters, the officials say. Two weeks ago, the U.S. and Iraqi governments announced the first coordinated effort to punish Iraqi and Syrian financial services companies used by the terrorists to conduct business.
The campaign has slashed profits from oil sales, traditionally the biggest revenue source for the Islamic State, U.S. officials say, and deepened the economic pain for a terrorist organization that until recently was regarded as the world's wealthiest. One sign of the financial strain, the officials say, is a shrinking payroll: After cutting salaries by 50 percent a few months ago, the Islamic State now appears to be struggling to pay its workers and fighters at all.
"We are destroying ISIL's economic base," Brett McGurk, the special U.S. envoy to the 67-nation coalition arrayed against the Islamic State, said at a news briefing recently, using one of the common acronyms for the militants.
"Their fighters are not getting paid," McGurk said, "and we have multiple indications of that."
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Coalition planes have been bombing the group's oil fields and tanker fleet for more than two years, but the most notable successes in recent months have come from military operations that targeted individual oil wells, including well casings and other underground infrastructure, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern officials familiar with the new strategy.
Previous airstrikes crippled the Islamic State's oil-producing capacity, but the militants consistently found ways to pump and refine oil in smaller batches using primitive methods, said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military operations. Now, even the small-scale operations are struggling, he said.
"We can take them back to the 19th century, but people were still able to extract oil in the 19th century -- it bubbles up to the ground and they find a way to bottle it and sell it to someone," the official said. The new approach involves inflicting "the maximum amount of damage with the right weapons so it will not be easy or quick for them to repair," the official said.
The improved targeting comes against a backdrop of ongoing airstrikes on tanker trucks used to haul oil and refined products such as gasoline and diesel. The bombing campaign, dubbed Operation Tidal Wave II, initially focused on large tanker convoys before the Islamic State leaders switched tactics and began relying on smaller vehicles, often traveling alone and hidden or camouflaged by day to elude detection.
Yet on Dec. 8, U.S. warplanes spotted and destroyed a caravan of 168 tankers near the terrorist-held Syrian city of Palmyra, in the largest raid of its kind since the conflict began. The U.S. pilots dropped leaflets warning the drivers -- typically civilians and local conscripts -- of the impending attack before A-10 Warthog jets swooped in to strafe the convoy.
"While the Palmyra raid was exceptionally large, the attacks themselves are a regular occurrence," said Daniel Glaser, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for terrorist financing. "This has been an ongoing campaign over the past year to target those tanker trucks."
As the result of such raids, oil revenue for the Islamic State is now a fraction of the estimated $1.3 million per day the group was earning in early 2015, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials said. Still, small truckloads of oil, mostly from the Syrian side of the militants' self-proclaimed caliphate, continue to find their way to the black market.
"ISIL is still selling oil to [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad," said a Middle Eastern official familiar with operations against the Islamic State, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. "It's an important revenue source, and we see Assad's people continuing to facilitate."
Money gone
The terrorist group also benefited initially from the vast hard-currency holdings it confiscated when it seized banks in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014, as well as banks in other cities in Iraq and Syria. The cash windfall from all those cities -- at least $500 million initially, according to U.S. estimates -- has largely vanished, in part because of airstrikes that targeted the bunkers where the money was stored.
Brig. Gen. Rick Uribe, a senior U.S. military commander, on Sunday praised the airstrikes, which he said are now targeting bridges on the Tigris River inside Mosul. The goal is to cut off Islamic State supply lines to fighters in the eastern sector.
"Those bridges are not destroyed, they are only degraded. They will be fixed by the Iraqis fairly quickly once they retake the city," he said.
Uribe said he agrees with the forecast given by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi that it would take another three months to liberate Mosul, the last Iraqi urban center still in the hands of the extremist group.
"We are on pretty close to where we want to be," Uribe said, adding that military planners knew that while the initial push toward the city would be quick, progress would become "significantly" slower on the city's fringes.
An Iraqi campaign to liberate Mosul and surrounding areas in Nineveh province began in mid-October, but most of the major fighting inside the city has been done by Iraqi special forces, known as the Counter Terrorism Service.
Uribe said the Iraqi forces are "at their peak," and "will continue to improve because of the lessons they are learning on a daily basis."
Uribe said Iraqi forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, would face a different fight when they cross to the west bank of the Tigris River, saying it will mostly be a "dismounted" battle fought in part on narrow streets, some of which were not wide enough for a vehicle to pass.
"It will be a different fight and they will adjust as they go from the east to the west. They are already planning these adjustments," he said.
He went on to praise Iraqi efforts to avoid harming civilians.
"They have been extremely good at taking care of those civilians. I don't know whether you would have seen this a few years ago," he said. "That was part of the training [by the coalition]. You got to treat people with dignity and respect. You cannot go into a city and make it worse than before."
Uribe also said the U.S. has the "required" number of military personnel in Iraq.
"You got to remember that we are here as guests of the government of Iraq, they've invited us, they've asked very specifically [for] what they need, what capabilities they need to be able to advise and assist them on the battlefield, not on the battlefield but in their battle," he said.
According to the Pentagon, there are 4,815 U.S. troops in Iraq, including special operations forces. The administration of President Barack Obama has authorized a maximum troop level of 5,262. That number does not include as many as 1,500 troops on temporary duty or short-term contracts.
Information for this article was contributed by Joby Warrick of The Washington Post; and by Hamza Hendawi of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/02/2017