Up to $800 million in Daesh cash reserves destroyed: US
Iran Press TV
Wed Apr 27, 2016 4:46PM
Airstrikes by the US-led coalition against the Daesh Takfiri group's positions inside Syria and Iraq have led to the possible destruction of up to $800 million of the terror group's cash reserves, a senior US military commander says.
US Air Force Major General Peter Gersten, who is responsible for all combat operations across Iraq and Syria, made the claim in a press briefing from the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad on Tuesday.
"We have all sorts of assessments and the intel community is looking at that. I've heard numbers anywhere between $300 million to $800 million. The center of that is about $500 million," he said.
Earlier in April, the US military announced a successful raid on a Daesh cash storage facility in Iraq's southern town of Mosul that killed a major Daesh operative and destroyed an estimated $150 million in cash.
Gersten (pictured below) said the raid was part of a US plan to cut the terror organization's financial resources and it sought to do so by attacking Daesh's oil smuggling network while also keeping an eye out for Daesh's cash reservoirs.
The commander told reporters that fewer than 20 air raids had been conducted against cash stores in Daesh-controlled parts of Iraq and Syria but the campaign has troubled the group to some extent.
"We are seeing, through other sources, that Daesh cannot pay their foreign fighters. They are trading vehicles now for pay. Some fighters aren't being paid at all is what we're seeing," he explained.
However, the general acknowledged the fact that there is a major downside to those attacks and that is the issue of civilian casualties.
During the $150 million airstrike, Gersten said the US forces tried to avoid that by employing the Israeli "knock on roof" method to make sure there are no civilians inside a building by firing warning shots at it before the actual raid.
They fired a Hellfire missile on the building and air burst it with bullets before going all-in, but the strike led to the death of the Daesh operative's wife, he said.
The announcement comes amid reports that the Pentagon is increasing the tolerance for civilian casualties in its aerial campaign against the terror group that started in 2014.
According to a statement on Friday by the US Central Command (CENTCOM), in the five-month period between September and February, a total of 20 civilians were killed and 11 others were injured in US-led attacks, raising the official tally of civilians killed in the campaign to 41, with 28 more injured.
Meanwhile, Airwars, a UK-based airstrikes monitoring group, says the real number of US civilian victims sits somewhere between 1,004 to 1,419 people as the US and its allies have carried out more than 12,000 plane and drone strikes in Iraq and Syria, dropping some 40,000 bombs.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
