Islamic State’s hold on territory may be slipping, but attacks in Paris, Tripoli and elsewhere show an international potency it did not have a year ago
With French jets pounding the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa, US planes targeting its oil tankers and Kurdish forces splitting a supply line from Mosul to Raqqa, the past three days have been among the most difficult that the terror group has faced in its self-declared caliphate.
As the dust settles, Isis’s hold on its original territory and revenues is, perhaps for the first time, showing signs of slipping. The group has lost control of the highway linking the two main hubs of its heartland. And the parallel oil trade, which had generated as much as $40m (£26m) a month even while refineries were being bombed, is now in jeopardy.
The Raqqa strikes, 20 in total, targeted parts of the city that had not been hit before, including a sports stadium, a museum, an equestrian centre and several administration buildings.
Residents questioned the usefulness of the strikes, suggesting they had no military purpose – a claim countered by French officials who said planners of the Paris attacks on Friday had given final instructions to the suicide bombers from within Raqqa, and that training camps were a primary target.
Further east, near Syria’s border with Iraq, there were repeated US strikes on oil tankers that transport crude from makeshift refineries. Oil production sites have been hit before, but not the tankers until now. US officials said 116 tankers were destroyed on Sunday, hobbling a distribution system that, along with taxation, accounts for much of Isis’s revenues.
The US military said it had dropped leaflets near tankers queuing near a collection site, warning them of an imminent attack. An estimated 300 trucks were in the area at the time. Officials said they had not targeted the trucks before now, fearing civilian casualties. There were no reports on whether drivers had been killed.
To the north-west, across the defunct border with Iraq, Kurdish forces spent Monday mopping up after recapturing the town of Sinjar from Isis forces who had seized it in August 2014, enslaving many residents and exiling others.
What remained of the Isis presence there had been bulldozed into the side of the town’s roads. Identification documents of the Islamist group’s recruits, stamped by inked thumbs, fluttered down one main road hours after the last member had fled.
Over the weekend, the few Sunni homes in a city that had been an ancient homeland of the Yazidi sect were burned by returning Yazidis. Isis had done the same to every Yazidi home it could identify. Barely a building in Sinjar is habitable, but Kurdish peshmerga forces have pledged to reopen it to residents within several weeks.
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/16/isis-caliphate-setbacks-islamic-state-attacks-paris-tripoli
