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WASHINGTON The Pentagon said late Thursday that it had targeted Mohammed
Emwazi, a member of the Islamic State often referred to as Jihadi John, in an
airstrike near Raqqa, Syria.
Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement that the military was
assessing the results of the strike to determine if Mr. Emwazi had been killed.
Mr. Emwazi, considered the most prominent British member of the militant group,
was shown in videos in late 2014 and early 2015 killing several American and other
Western hostages.
The British government, along with that of France and other European countries, is
grappling with how to stem the tide of thousands of European citizens, including
hundreds of Britons, who have traveled to Iraq and Syria to fight alongside the
Islamic State.
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Mr. Emwazi, born in Kuwait and reared in London, has appeared as a black-masked
figure in videos in which the American journalists James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff
and the American aid worker Peter Kassig were beheaded.
The militant traveled to Syria in 2012 and first showed up in Islamic State videos in
August 2014. Mr. Emwazi, who is in his mid-20s, grew up in a trim housing estate in
West London and graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in
computer programming.
He was part of a loose network of young Muslims in the mid-2000s, some with
friendships going back to childhood, who become deeply alienated from British and
Western society.
The North London Boys, as the network is sometimes called, has sent dozens of
young men to fight, first in Somalia and more recently in Syria. The men appear to
have been motivated initially by a civil war in Somalia.
Court documents show that Mr. Emwazi and others were well known to the British
security services. According to a legal document from 2012, they were part of a
network of United Kingdom and East African-based Islamist extremists involved in
the provision of funds and equipment to Somalia for terrorism-related purposes.
ERBIL, Iraq The United States and its allies have sharply increased their airstrikes
against the sprawling oil fields that the Islamic State controls in eastern Syria in an
effort to disrupt one of the terrorist groups main sources of revenue, American
officials said this week.
For months, the United States has been frustrated by the Islamic States ability to
keep producing and exporting oil what Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter
recently called a critical pillar of the financial infrastructure of the group which
generates about $40 million a month, or nearly $500 million a year, according to
Treasury Department estimates.

While the American-led air campaign has conducted periodic airstrikes against oil
refineries and other production facilities in eastern Syria that the group controls, the
organizations engineers have been able to quickly repair damage, and keep the oil
flowing, American officials said. The Obama administration has also balked at
attacking the Islamic States fleet of tanker trucks its main distribution network
fearing civilian casualties.
But now the administration has decided to increase the attacks and focus on
inflicting damage that takes longer to fix or requires specially ordered parts,
American officials said.
The first evidence of the new strategy came on Oct. 21, when B-1 bombers and
other allied warplanes hit 26 targets in the Omar oil field, one of the two largest oilproduction sites in all of Syria. American military analysts estimate the Omar field
generates $1.7 million to $5.1 million per month for the Islamic State. French
warplanes struck another oil field nearby earlier this week.
The goal of the operation over the next several weeks is to cripple eight major oil
fields, about two-thirds of the refineries and other oil-production sites controlled by
the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL.
We intend to shut it all down, Col. Steven H. Warren, a military spokesman in
Baghdad, said in an email on Thursday.
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El Isbah
SYRIA
Jafra
Deir
al-Zour
Oil and natural
gas fields
Sijan
Fields targeted
by the United States
Azraq
Omar
Barghooth
Tanak
ISIS CONTROL
Abu
Hardan
SYRIA
Detail
5 MILES
IRAQ
IRAQ
OPEN GRAPHIC

By The New York Times

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More broadly, the intensified targeting of one of the militant groups major financing
sources is part of the Obama administrations effort to accelerate the pace of the
anti-Islamic State campaign. The campaign against the militant group also includes
helping Kurdish fighters retake the Iraqi border town of Sinjar, and sending some 50
Special Operations troops to assist opposition fighters in eastern Syria as well as the
air campaign.
Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the head of that campaign, headquartered in Al Udeid
Air Base in Qatar, said in an interview last week that allied warplanes are
intensifying attacks on a series of fixed sites such as oil-production facilities, bombmaking factories and other so-called critical nodes that support the Islamic States
war effort.

The revamped plan for attacking the oil-production sites comes after weeks of
intense study of eight major fields Omar, Tanak, El Isbah, Sijan, Jafra, Azraq,
Barghooth and Abu Hardan to determine how to inflict more financial pain on the
Islamic State, American officials said.
Instead of putting the groups oil-production capability out of action for days, the
new goal is to knock out specific installations for six months to a year, the officials
said. This involves targeting fuel oil separators and elements of pumping stations at
sites in Islamic State-controlled areas of Deir el-Zour, a city on the Euphrates River
near the eastern border with Iraq.
At the same time, the United States shifted some of its surveillance and
reconnaissance planes from bases in the Persian Gulf to Incirlik air base in Turkey, a
much shorter flight to Syria to allow planes to spend more time lingering over their
targets.
The new operation is called Tidal Wave II, named after Operation Tidal Wave,
the World War II campaign to hit Romanias oil industry and thus hurt Nazi Germany.
Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, who in September became the commander of the
international coalitions effort in Iraq and Syria, came up with the name.
Much of the initial targeting was done in South Carolina at Shaw Air Force Base,
which has become a leading symbol of the militarys ability to carry out global
operations from afar.
One of the main objectives for the scores of analysts and planners at the air base
has been to attack its ability to produce and sell oil.
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RECENT COMMENTS
Prof. Jai Prakash Sharma
2 hours ago
Without clearly defined goals and commensurate strategy the stray US attacks on
the Islamic State or their assets is like groping in the...
Mathias Weitz
2 hours ago
Let the jihadist have their own state,let them gather there.We can bomb them, we
can reduce them,we can play whack a mole,and nobody, even...
Melvin
5 hours ago

What percentage of ISIS is funded by sales of oil from these fields?What percentage
comes from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf?

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In the air campaigns first three months, for instance, allied warplanes damaged or
destroyed more than two dozen smaller mobile refineries and about twice as many
collection points where drivers dump their crude oil to be hauled to refineries.
Now that targeting is being intensified. The art we had of building target sets and
doing deep studies on adversaries, in some cases was a lost art, General Brown
said. What targets are we not striking that we could go strike? How do we bring all
the intelligence together?
On the Oct. 21 mission, American aircraft struck Islamic State-controlled oil
refineries, command and control centers, and transportation infrastructure in the
Omar oil field, which produced about 30,000 barrels a day when it was fully
functioning. More recently, the field produced about a third of that or less, analysts
said.
It was very specific targets that would result in long-term incapacitation of their
ability to sell oil, to get it out of the ground and transport it, Maj. Michael
Filanowski, a military operations officer, told reporters in Baghdad after the strike.
The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said on Tuesday that his nations
warplanes had attacked more oil targets in the same region.
CONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORY73COMMENTS
It was Frances fourth wave of strikes in Syria since President Franois Hollande
decided in September to join the campaign there against the Islamic State, and the
second in as many days.
American commanders cautioned that it may take some time to gauge the impact
of the new targeting, given the financial reserves the militant group has built up.
Unlike measuring the immediate impact of bombing tanks or soldiers, it might be
longer to feel the effect of oil fields, General Brown said.