US-led raids hit jihadist oil as Al Qaeda threatens reprisals

DAMASCUS — US-led warplanes kept up strikes on oil sites funding the Islamic State (IS) group on Sunday, as Al Qaeda's Syria affiliate threatened reprisals after a key operative was reported killed.

The United States, along with coalition partners Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, hit four modular refineries as well as an IS command and control post, all north of Raqqa in Syria, US Central Command said.

"Initial indications are that they [the strikes] were successful," it said in a statement.

The latest raids were part of 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 oilfields and which the jihadists have sought to exploit through improvised refining and smuggling.

The coalition strikes hit close by the Turkish frontier, near 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.

The coalition carried out raids on the jihadist heartland province of Raqqa early Sunday as it pressed what Washington says are “near continuous” strikes.

The raids also destroyed a plastics factory outside Raqqa 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.

The air strikes on Sunday also destroyed a tank and damaged another near Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, US Central Command said.

Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, said apparent US missile strikes had killed at least seven civilians in Idlib province in northwestern Syria last Tuesday, calling for a probe into possible violations of the laws of war.

In Iraq, the Pentagon said US-led air strikes near insurgent-held Fallujah on Sunday destroyed two IS checkpoints and a transport vehicle used by the jihadists.

Al Nusra threat 

On the ground in western Iraq, pro-government forces backed by warplanes on Sunday repelled an IS attack on the strategic town of Amriyat Al Fallujah, security sources said.

“Warplanes eventually engaged the insurgents and killed 15 of them,” local police chief Aref Al Janabi said, without identifying the aircraft.

The town “has strategic importance. It is a main logistics road for the army and it is the link between Anbar and Karbala”, a Shiite holy city south of Baghdad, Janabi said.

Multiple European governments have approved plans to join the air campaign in Iraq, including most recently Britain.

British fighter jets flew their first combat mission over Iraq on Saturday but returned to base in Cyprus without firing a shot after no targets were identified.

European governments have resisted joining the US-led air campaign in Syria for fear of getting embroiled in the country’s more than three-year-old civil war, forcing Washington to rely on Arab allies.

The opening salvo of the US-led bombing campaign in Syria actually targeted not IS but its jihadist rival Al Nusra Front and drew a threat of retaliation on Saturday after one of its leaders was reported killed.

Al Nusra has been targeted by the US-led air campaign killing at least 57 of its fighters, according to the observatory.

Washington has made a distinction between the wider Al Nusra Front and a cell of foreign fighters dubbed the Khorasan Group that it says was plotting attacks against the United States.

Muhsin Al Fadhli, a long-standing Al Qaeda operative and alleged leader of Khorasan, was reportedly among those killed in the strikes.

Al Nusra threatened reprisals for the deaths of its militants.

The allies had “committed a horrible act that is going to put them on the list of jihadist targets throughout the world”, Al Nusra spokesman Abu Firas Al Suri said in an online video message.

Al Nusra, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, is prominent on the battlefield across much of western Syria but has been at sometimes deadly loggerheads with IS since Al Qaeda leadership disavowed the rival group’s commanders in February.