U.S.-led aircraft have dropped nearly 5,000 bombs in the air war against Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) militants in Iraq and Syria, damaging or destroying more than 3,000 targets including tanks, the Pentagon said Wednesday. The latest figures released by the U.S. military signal a steady expansion in the scale of the air campaign launched in August and also reveal an adversary with hundreds of armored and other sophisticated vehicles at its disposal. Since coalition air raids started in Iraq in August and in Syria in late September, U.S. and allied aircraft have struck 58 tanks, 184 Humvee armored vehicles, 303 pickup trucks, 26 armored vehicles and 394 other vehicles, according to statistics from the Pentagon. Most of the vehicles, many of them U.S. made, had been seized by ISIS fighters from the retreating Iraqi army. U.S. military officers could not say how many of the targets were damaged or destroyed but spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told reporters: "I'm confident the destruction level is high." It also remained unclear how many tanks or other vehicles the ISIS group still has in its arsenal after the air raids. Warren said the military did not want to say what percentage of ISIS weapons or vehicles had been destroyed because "we don't want our enemy to know how much we know about them." The United States and its Western and Arab allies have carried out 1,676 strikes so far and launched 4,775 munitions, officials said.
American commanders say the raids have halted the advance of the ISIS group in Iraq, disrupted its crude oil smuggling network and hampered its ability to move on the ground. But the ISIS militants remain in control of large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq and continue to receive new recruits.
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