AhlulBayt News Agency - A coalition airstrike destroyed 83 oil tankers used by the ISIS group over the weekend in eastern Syria, the US military announced on Monday.
Pentagon spokesman Matthew Allen said the strike was conducted by "multiple coalition aircraft" Sunday evening near Albu Kamal, in Deir Ezzor province along Syria's border with Iraq.
"This strike is a component of ongoing Tidal Wave II operation designed to attack the distribution network of Daesh's oil-smuggling operation and degrade their capacity to fund their operations," Allen said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
Operation Tidal Wave II, named after a World War II mission to bomb oil refineries, has seen the US-led coalition conduct a series of strikes on the IS group's oil infrastructure.
In just two strikes last year, coalition planes destroyed about 400 tankers that were lined up in the desert waiting to take on illicit oil.
In those cases, the United States dropped pamphlets warning drivers of the imminent strike. The Pentagon said the drivers were not IS members.
It was not immediately clear if drivers were warned ahead of Sunday's strike.
Reports show that Turkey has been involved in the smuggling of oil from areas held by the Daesh terrorist group in Iraq and Syria. Ankara has strongly rejected the allegation.
Analysts, however, say the airstrikes have not been that effective and only damaged the infrastructure of Syria and neighboring Iraq.
On Monday, the US envoy to the UN said there will be no swift victory in the ongoing fight to free Syria's second city of Aleppo from Daesh, voicing alarm over the fate of civilians caught up in the fighting.
The longer the fighting drags on, the more civilians will be caught in the middle, the more they will pay the highest price," Samantha Power told the UN Security Council.
"Despite the overwhelming force of the Assad regime, Russian, Iran and Hezbollah on one side, neither side will be able to win a swift or decisive victory in the battle for Aleppo," she claimed.
Many of the Daesh terrorists were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to target the Syrian people and government.
Since March 2011, the United States and its regional allies, in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have been conducting a proxy war against Syria.
The conflict has left more than 470,000 Syrians dead and half of the country’s population of about 23 million displaced within or beyond the Arab country’s borders.
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