US-led raids hit jihadist oil sites

FE Team | Published: September 29, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

SYRIA : A young rebel fighter walks with his weapon past buses wrecks in the northern city of Aleppo. The US-led coalition hit Islamic State group targets around a Syrian town on the Turkish border where tens of thousands fled a jihadist assault, a monito

DAMASCUS, Sept 28 (AFP): US-led warplanes kept up strikes on oil sites funding the Islamic State group on Sunday, as Al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate threatened reprisals after a key operative was reported killed.
The coalition raids destroyed three makeshift oil refineries in jihadist-controlled territory in Syria, intensifying efforts to deny IS funding after a wave of strikes on its oil infrastructure on Thursday night.
IS controls a swathe of territory straddling northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria, that includes most of Syria's main oil fields and which the jihadists have sought to exploit through improvised refining and smuggling.
The coalition strikes hit close by the Turkish frontier, near the town of Tal Abyad just across the border from the Turkish town of Akcakale, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
"At least three makeshift refineries under IS control in the Tal Abyad region were destroyed," the Observatory said.
"IS had been refining crude and selling it to Turkish buyers," said the Britain-based watchdog, which has a broad network of sources inside Syria.
Before the launch of US-led air strikes on IS in Syria last Tuesday analysts say the jihadists were earning as much as $3 million a day from oil revenues.
Output from IS-controlled fields stood at 80,000 barrels per day, far exceeding the 17,000 barrels per day the Syrian oil ministry said it was pumping.
The strikes around Tal Abyad came after Saturday raids near the mainly Kurdish town of Ain al-Arab, also very close to the Turkish border.
The town, known as Kobane in Kurdish, has been under assault by IS for more than a week, sparking an exodus of at least 160,000 refugees into Turkey.
The coalition also kept up its raids on the jihadist heartland province of Raqa early Sunday as it pressed what Washington says are "near continuous" strikes.
The raids destroyed a plastics factory outside Raqa city, killing one civilian, the Observatory said.
IS oil infrastructure has been one of the main targets of the bombing campaign in Syria that Washington and its Arab allies launched last Tuesday, building on the air war under way against IS in Iraq since August 8.