Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the US-led coalition, said that a November airstrike had killed Abu Salah who he described as “one of the most senior and experienced members of [Isis’s] financial network”.
A former Al-Qaeda member, Abu Salah was the third senior Isis financial official to be killed in the past three months, Col Warren said. Two other senior Isis members who were involved in extortion activities — named by the Pentagon as Abu Maryam and Abu Wakman al-Tunisi — were also killed, he said.
“Killing him and his predecessors exhausts the knowledge and talent needed to co-ordinate funding within the organisation,” Col Warren said of Abu Salah. According to a report by the Brookings Institution, Abu Salah’s real name was Muafaq Mustafa Mohammed al-Karmoush.
The Pentagon announced the airstrikes as the US Treasury said that a significant part of the $500m that Isis had earned from oil sales came from trade with the Assad regime.
Adam Szubin, acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said that Isis had looted between $500m and $1bn from bank vaults it captured in Iraq and Syria and was gaining “many millions more” from extorting local populations.
In prepared remarks at Chatham House in London, he said that the stepped-up bombing campaign against Isis’ oil infrastructure over the last month was “markedly degrading” the funds it raised from selling energy.
During questions, Mr Szubin said that Isis was “selling a great deal of oil to the Assad regime”, according to Reuters. “The two are trying to slaughter each other and they are still engaged in millions and millions of dollars of trade,” he said.
Some of the oil was also crossing over into Turkey or into Kurdish regions, he said. Col Warren said that US airstrikes in recent days had killed around 350 Isis fighters in Ramadi, which could account for about half of the force it had defending the Iraqi city.
The US has been giving air support to a push by Iraqi forces trying to take back Ramadi, which fell to Isis in May. Secretary of defence Ashton Carter has said that the US is prepared to use Apache attack helicopters in the Ramadi battle if the Iraqi government requests them.
However, US officials have been reluctant to predict when the city might fall, despite the fact that the 10,000-strong Iraqi force vastly outnumbers Isis fighters in the city. Mr Carter said on Thursday that progress had been “disappointingly slow”.
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