U.S. Special Forces have killed a top ISIS commander in charge of their lucrative oil business, and captured his slaver wife in a dramatic overnight raid. Elite forces stormed a residential building in the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor, killing 12 jihadists in hand-to-hand combat before claiming the scalp of Abu Sayyaf, the twisted regime’s ‘oil minister’. Terrified militants tried to use women and children as human shields as the American troops advanced, but Pentagon officials said the raid was pulled off with no harm to civilians.
Though the original aim was to take Sayyaf alive, the soldiers killed him when he tried to fight back. They recovered laptops and cell phones which could provide an insight into ISIS’s oil-smuggling operations, which bring in vast wealth for the terrorist organization. His wife Umm Sayyaf, was captured in the raid and is now in military detention. It is believed that she was involved in ISIS’s slave-trading operation, and sold members of the oppressed Yazidi minority into slavery.
She was taken back to a detention facility in Iraq. It is unknown what will be done with her, but she will not be sent to the American facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a Pentagon spokesman told the Guardian.
‘No one’s going to Gitmo,’ Colonel Steve Warren said.
Defense officials, speaking anonymously, said that soldiers were dropped into the combat zone from Black Hawk helicopters and Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. No American forces were killed or even injured in the night-time attack, though at least one Black Hawk chopper was riddle with bullet holes as ISIS forces tried to retaliate. The raid was followed up with a coalition airstrike on oil fields near Deir Ezzor, which Syrian state media says took out a further 40 extremists.