Russia's 2015 Strikes on ISIS Oil Trucks: Claims and Facts

Russia’s November 2015 Strikes on ISIS Oil Trucks, in Context

In mid-November 2015, Russia announced that its warplanes had destroyed about 500 tanker trucks carrying oil for the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. Within days the United States carried out its own first large strike on ISIS fuel convoys, destroying 116 trucks near the Syria–Iraq border. Both campaigns aimed at the same target: the oil trade that was then the group's biggest single source of money. The strikes hurt ISIS financially, but they were not the end of the group. It lost its last patch of territory in Syria only in March 2019.

Here is what was claimed at the time, what independent sources later reported, and how the battle over ISIS oil fitted into the wider war.

Why Russia stepped up the air campaign

Russia began its air campaign in Syria on 30 September 2015. Moscow said it was targeting ISIS, while US officials argued that many of the strikes hit Western-backed rebel groups and civilians instead.

The focus sharpened after 31 October 2015, when Metrojet Flight 9268, a Russian charter jet flying holidaymakers home from Sharm el-Sheikh, broke up over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. All 224 people on board were killed. On 17 November, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) confirmed that a homemade bomb had brought the plane down. The Sinai branch of ISIS had already claimed responsibility, and Russia offered a US$50 million reward for information on the perpetrators.

The same week, Russian state media reported a wave of strikes on ISIS targets in Syria, including the tweet below from the Russian broadcaster RT.

Russia targets 206 #ISIS sites in Syria after confirming bomb downed #A321 plane over Sinai https://t.co/shCKjT5ZhM pic.twitter.com/jBbhxHDunf
— RT (@RT_com) Νοέμβριος 18, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

What Russia said it destroyed

Colonel General Andrey Kartapolov of the Russian General Staff told reporters that Russian jets were now flying a "free hunt" against tanker trucks in ISIS-held areas. He described the convoys as a "pipeline on wheels" and gave the headline figure:

"In just the first few days, our aviation has destroyed 500 fuel tanker trucks."
Col. Gen. Andrey Kartapolov, Russian General Staff, November 2015

To support the claim, the Russian Defence Ministry showed aerial images of long lines of trucks, saying that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of fuel had been moved from Syria for refining in Iraq. A video report on the strikes is below.

The figure of 500 trucks came from the Russian military itself and was never independently confirmed. That does not mean it was invented, but it is the kind of number that is hard to check in a war zone, and readers should treat it as a claim rather than a verified count.

The US-led coalition's Operation Tidal Wave II

The United States had started its own campaign against ISIS oil a few weeks earlier. Operation Tidal Wave II began around 21 October 2015, when B-1 bombers and other aircraft hit the al-Omar oil field in eastern Syria. The name echoes a 1943 Allied raid on oil refineries in Romania.

On 16 November 2015, US aircraft destroyed 116 fuel tankers gathered near Abu Kamal, on the border with Iraq. Four A-10 attack jets and two AC-130 gunships took part. Because many of the drivers were civilians hired by ISIS rather than fighters, the coalition said it used low "show of force" passes, warning leaflets and warning shots to give them a chance to leave first.

By late December 2015, a US military spokesman, Colonel Steve Warren, said strikes had destroyed about 90% of ISIS oil production, and the Pentagon put the number of destroyed tankers at about 400. Across 2015 to 2017, coalition strikes destroyed more than 2,500 tanker trucks and cut ISIS oil revenue by more than 90%, according to figures collected on Wikipedia's page about the operation.

As Russia destroys ISIS oil infrastructure, even the worst propagandists begin to ask the right questions. pic.twitter.com/VKUVsW5aKF
— Christoph Germann (@newgreatgame) Νοέμβριος 18, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

How much money did ISIS really make from oil?

Viral posts in 2015 claimed ISIS earned "$2 million daily" by selling oil to Europe, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The broad scale was roughly right, but that list of buyers was not supported by the evidence available.

In December 2015, Adam Szubin, then the acting US Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said ISIS had earned more than $500 million from oil and was selling as much as $40 million a month, which works out at a little over $1.3 million a day. He added that a far greater share of ISIS oil ended up in areas controlled by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, while some was used inside ISIS territory, some went to Kurdish areas and some crossed into Turkey through smugglers.

Oil was estimated to provide about half of the group's income. The rest came from taxes and extortion in the cities it held, looted bank vaults (up to $1 billion, according to Szubin), and, reportedly, kidnapping for ransom and the sale of looted antiquities.

The Turkey accusations

Relations between Russia and Turkey collapsed after Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 bomber near the Syrian border on 24 November 2015. President Vladimir Putin then said Russia had intelligence that large quantities of ISIS oil were flowing into Turkey, and Russian officials accused the family of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of profiting. Erdoğan's son denied any involvement, and the claims about the family were never proven. Smuggling across the border by traders was real; a state-run trade was not shown.

Why the oil strikes were not "the end of ISIS"

Cutting the oil trade mattered. ISIS lost much of its refining capacity and its easy access to black-market traders. But oil was never its only money, and money was never its only strength.

The map below shows how far the group's attacks reached beyond Syria and Iraq, which is one reason air strikes alone could not defeat it.

The real collapse came on the ground. ISIS had declared its so-called caliphate on 29 June 2014. Iraqi forces retook the Baiji refinery in October 2015, and by September 2016 Iraq's oil ministry said the group no longer controlled any oil wells in the country. ISIS lost both Mosul and Raqqa during 2017. Its final enclave, the Syrian village of Baghouz, fell on 23 March 2019, and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US raid on 26 October 2019.

Even then, the group survived as an insurgency and through affiliates in other regions, a reminder that destroying an organisation's income weakens it but does not erase the ideas or networks behind it.

How to read war claims like these

The November 2015 headlines show a pattern worth remembering whenever a conflict is in the news:

Look for who is counting. Both Russia and the US released strike figures for their own operations. Numbers from a party to a war are claims until someone else checks them.
Watch for round numbers. "500 trucks" or "$2 million a day" are easy to repeat and hard to verify. Official estimates usually come with ranges and caveats.
Separate the trade from the buyers. It was well documented that ISIS sold oil. Who ended up buying it was far murkier, and accusations against governments were often political.
Check what happened next. A dramatic strike can look decisive in the week it happens. Timelines published years later, such as the Wilson Center's, give a more sober picture.

The strikes on ISIS fuel convoys were a real and important part of the campaign against the group. They were one chapter in a long war, not its final page.

Sources: Wikipedia: Operation Tidal Wave II; Wikipedia: Metrojet Flight 9268; NBC News: ISIS earned $500 million selling oil, Treasury official says; Wilson Center: Timeline of the rise, spread and fall of the Islamic State. Lead photo and map as previously published on this page; embedded posts by RT and Christoph Germann on X.

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