(Newswire.net — January 17, 2016) — The soundless declassified recording was made on January 11th and exclusively broadcasted on CNN. The video shows two bombs, weighing approximately 2,000lbs, falling on the building. After the explosions, clouds of banknotes were flying in the air with the money falling on the rooftops of nearby buildings.
Officials have not specified how much money there was, or which currency was in question, but said that there was millions in cash, reports CNN.
“It was a good strike”, said General Lloyd Austin, head of the U.S. Central Command, and added that this is not the first US attack on an Islamic State’s money warehouse.
He explained that the jihadists needed funds to pay their fighters, to recruit new ones, and for various contentious actions. One of the best ways to destroy the Islamic State is to stop any possible sources of funding.
The US plans to destroy more of the Islamic State’s financial resources, in an attempt to disable the terror group’s ability to function as a state, reports the Washington Times.
The coalition forces have been trying since November 2015 to cut off the terror group’s money sources. They are targeting oil fields and trucks carrying the barrels in order to stop the oil smuggling, which is one of the main sources of the terrorists income.
According to NBC News reports from July 2015, the Islamic fanatics were making three times as much from oil smuggling as the US officials previously thought. On a monthly basis, they made from anywhere between $8m to $10m.
When it comes to human victims in this last attack on the ISIS money warehouse, officials neither confirmed nor denied that innocent civilians were killed in the Mosul strike, nor that there were guards in the bank building during the bombing, reported NBC.
The building is in an area where civilians are located, and there was a risk of civilian victims. That is why the US aircrafts and drones monitered the site for days trying to determine when the fewest number of civilians would be in the area.