29 May 2016

U.S. Says Its Strikes Are Hitting More Significant ISIS Targets

MAY 25, 2016 

A Navy air crew after a mission over Iraq last year. Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times 
WASHINGTON — Nearly two years into the American-led air war against the Islamic State, military officials say they have corrected the poor intelligence collection and clumsy process for identifying targets that initially plagued the campaign, and are now hitting targets like oil rigs and secret cash coffers that finance the terrorist group’s war machine.

The destruction in recent months of these targets, deep behind enemy lines — which commanders previously avoided for fear of causing civilian casualties — has seriously damaged the Islamic State’s ability to pay its fighters, govern and attract new recruits, military officials say.

“We’re hitting them where it hurts a lot more than we were in the past,” Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the air war commander, said in one of two recent telephone interviews from his headquarters in Qatar. “Every bomb now has a greater impact.”

To speed up the approval of targets, the Pentagon shifted the authority for most strikes that posed a risk to civilians to commanders in the field from the military’s Central Command in Tampa, Fla., which oversees operations in the Middle East.

But critics say that the new process has increased the possibility of civilian casualties, a charge the military disputes.

“We’re concerned that shortening the approval loop will mean more civilian casualties simply because there will likely be more bombing missions,” said Federico Borello, executive director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “The drive to defeat ISIS should not result in greater risk to civilian men, women and children.”

Since taking charge last June, General Brown, an F-16 pilot and former commandant of the Air Force’s weapons school, has overhauled targeting practices, lobbied spy agencies in Washington for more help and insisted on higher-impact missions. A bomb that used to hit insignificant targets, like isolated Islamic State checkpoints or empty trenches, could now destroy millions of dollars in cash or shut down oil wells.

General Brown and other officials acknowledged the scope of the problems in the operation’s first year, which was also hampered by inexperienced planners, staffing shortages and internal rivalries. Those disclosures, filling in more details than were previously known, help explain why it took the Pentagon so long to focus on revenue-related targets like the oil fields and cash warehouses.

An 2014 airstrike against Islamic State militants in Syria, as seen from Turkey. Credit Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

The Pentagon estimates that the coalition’s land and air operations have reclaimed 45 percent of the territory the Islamic State seized in Iraq in 2014, and 20 percent in Syria. The group’s oil production has fallen about 30 percent (over 400 oil tanker trucks have been destroyed), with revenue from oil sales down as much as 50 percent, the Pentagon says.

The Islamic State has slashed fighters’ salaries in Raqqa, the group’s de facto headquarters in Syria, by up to 50 percent, American intelligence analysts say.

The United States and its allies still drop most of their bombs — nine out of every 10 — on Islamic State fighters, weapons or other targets that pop up on the battlefield. The goal is not only to punish the Islamic State, but also to help Iraqi troops, who announced a push toward Falluja this week, and friendly Syrian militias.

The biggest shift in the past year, however, has been in the remaining 10 percent of targets: mostly fixed sites behind the front lines that specialists are taking much more time to analyze. General Brown insisted on increasing the quality of these so-called deliberate targets, which include headquarters, barracks and storage facilities, to ensure that the strikes would have a deeper strategic effect on the Islamic State.

The military caught its first big break last May, when it seized information about the leadership structure and financial operations of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The information was gathered during a Delta Force commando raid in eastern Syria in which Abu Sayyaf, a leader of the terrorist group, was killed and his wife, Umm Sayyaf, was captured.

In the past year, the United States has increased the number of spy planes and other surveillance aircraft over Iraq and Syria, as well as the number of targeting specialists assigned to the mission. Hundreds more Special Operations forces are now on the ground in the two countries, sending back valuable information, as are thousands of Iraqi troops and Syrian militia members whom the Americans and their allies are training and advising.

“We do have a much better sense now for what this enemy looks like, how this enemy operates and how they’re structured,” said Col. Steve Warren, the military’s chief spokesman in Baghdad.

There was also intense pressure in the fall from President Obama and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter to accelerate the campaign, which is costing $12 million a day. While the number of aircraft available to commanders has remained about the same since then, many of the 750 warplanes that were based in the Persian Gulf can fly shorter and more frequent missions since Turkey opened its airfield at Incirlik.

Airstrikes Against ISIS 

The United States and allies have conducted around 12,400 airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. 

In Syria

800

airstrikes

600

400

200

Nov. ’14

April ’15

Oct. ’15

April ’16

In Iraq 

Note: Figures from August to October 2014 and May 2016 are not shown. 

Source: Department of Defense | By The New York Times 

Airstrikes increased 22 percent the month after the targeting changes took effect in the fall, and they have generally remained at higher levels, damaging the Islamic State’s military forces, its leadership, its financial network, its attractiveness to foreign fighters and its ability to move forces on the battlefield.

“ISIL is suffering financially,” Daniel L. Glaser, a top Treasury official, said this month. “That said, they still have a considerable amount of money.”

IHS Conflict Monitor, a London-based organization that tracks terrorist financing, estimates that the group still earns about $56 million a month.

After more than a decade of focusing on support for ground troops fighting insurgents, the Air Force had to relearn the art of analyzing which fixed sites, if destroyed, would have the most significant effect on the enemy, General Brown said. They include the Islamic State’s oil facilities, bulk cash stockpiles and factories for manufacturing roadside bombs.

Scott F. Murray, a retired Air Force colonel and veteran of air campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, who oversaw deliberate target development from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, said his team had prepared many valid financial and oil-related targets in early 2015. But senior commanders refused to approve them, fearing civilian casualties.

That reluctance disappeared under General Brown, who is scheduled to brief reporters in Washington on Thursday about the air campaign’s progress.

Using a combination of satellite imagery, electronic intercepts and informers’ tips, analysts have tracked Islamic State operatives storing huge amounts of cash in bank vaults, private residences and other hiding places. The coalition has conducted 21 strikes on cash storage and distribution sites since October, destroying what the Central Command said was hundreds of millions of dollars.

Before, the targeting process was poorly synchronized and inefficient. Information was stored in various spreadsheets and distributed via secure communications. Now, the military is developing an online, interactive database, including digital maps, that anyone in the intelligence agencies can use to see what targets are being worked and who is working them.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter spoke to American military personnel in December at Turkey’s Incirlik air base, from which strikes are now being launched. Credit Associated Press 

“The problem before was that everyone was running hard, but not necessarily in the same direction,” Lt. Col. Jeff Sgarlata, deputy chief of the air command’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance division, said in a telephone interview from Qatar. “We’re now operating more efficiently and more effectively.”

But the campaign has detractors, including the human rights groups concerned about civilian casualties, which the military says it takes great care to avoid.

The Central Command has reviewed 25 allegations of civilian casualties in the bombing campaign that it deemed credible, and it acknowledged that airstrikes had killed 41 civilians and injured 28 others, according to a spokesman, Cmdr. Kyle Raines.

Civilian groups put that figure much higher. Over 415 civilians have been killed in coalition airstrikes in Syria alone, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group in Britain that tracks the conflict through a network of contacts in Syria.

Other critics say the air campaign has not attacked the Islamic State aggressively enough.

“The administration continues a misleading narrative regarding their level of effort against the Islamic State,” said David A. Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force general who planned the American air campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 and in the Persian Gulf in 1991.

“Yes, they are accomplishing a symbolic level of effort,” said General Deptula, who is now dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in Arlington, Va. “However, that level of effort is anemic when considered relative to previous operations.”

The United States has averaged about 14.5 strikes a day in Iraq and Syria since the air campaign started in August 2014, though that figure has gradually risen (there were about 17 American strikes a day in April). The United States conducts about 75 percent of all strikes. About two-thirds are in Iraq and one-third in Syria, reflecting the priority of protecting Iraqi troops in combat.

In contrast, the NATO air war in Libya in 2011 involved about 50 strikes a day in its first two months. The 2001 campaign in Afghanistan averaged 85 daily strikes, and the campaign in Iraq in 2003 averaged about 800, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

American military officials said that because targeting was more precise now than in past campaigns and more care was given to assessing the quality of each target, fewer flights were needed.

A version of this article appears in print on May 26, 2016, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Says Its Airstrikes Are Hitting More Significant ISIS Targets. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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