83 Daesh oil tankers destroyed in Syria airstrike: US

The Pentagon says 83 oil tankers used by the Daesh terrorist group have been destroyed in a US-led coalition airstrike in eastern Syria over the weekend.

According to Pentagon spokesman Matthew Allen, the air raid was conducted by "multiple coalition aircraft" on 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 Monday.

Operation Tidal Wave II, which was named after a World War II mission to bomb oil refineries, has witnessed the US-led coalition carry out a series of raids on Daesh’s oil infrastructure.

Coalition planes involved in two strikes last year struck and razed about 400 tankers lined up in the desert to be filled with illicit oil.

Prior to those strikes, the United States dropped pamphlets, warning drivers of the imminent strike as the Pentagon said they were not Daesh members.

However, it was not immediately clear if the US warned drivers of the 83 tankers of the strike on Sunday.

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.

The United States and some of its allies have been carrying out airstrikes against alleged Daesh targets inside Syria and Iraq since 2014.

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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