militia ghters of the SDF also had their
eyes on the oil elds, and just as the IS
defenses were collapsing on the western
bank of the Euphrates they made their
move. A huge column of heavily armed
pick-up trucks, including several carrying
US special forces JTACs, raced south, but
as they approached Deir ez-Zor on the
eastern bank of the Euphrates a Russian
jet carried out an air strike on their
advanced guard. Several Kurdish ghters
were wounded before US o cers could
intervene over the ‘hotline’ to the Russian
air headquarters in Syria to warn the air
strikes o .
The Syrian government was now
determined to push its own troops over
the Euphrates to head o the Kurdish
advance and began its ferry operations.
As mentioned at the start of this article,
IS reacted by launching its own drone
bombing campaign to try to put the
Syrian ferries and Russian bridges out of
action. Almost every IS unit had a drone
unit, equipped with hobby drones bought
by supporters outside Syria and Iraq. As
Syrian troops headed east towards Deir
ez-Zor they uncovered a series of IS drone
workshops where engineers had been
creating modi ed drones equipped for
strike missions with improvised weapons.
Before striking at the Russian bridging
teams on the Euphrates, the IS dronebombers had been in action in Raqqa and
Mosul in Iraq.
Syrian columns continued to push both
northward and southward in a bid to drive
IS ghters from the western bank of the
Euphrates. The Syrian L-39 squadron was
at the forefront of these attacks, and on
one occasion dropped bombs within a few
meters of advancing government troops.Innovative air power
By late November the remaining
existence of the caliphate could probably
be measured in weeks as Syrian,
Kurdish and Iraqi troops converged
on its last enclave in the far south-east
corner of Syria, centered on the town
of Al-Bukamal. A new development in
October was an incursion of Turkish
troops into north-west Syria to set up
a bu er zone in the region known as
the Idlib pocket. Open-source aircraft
tracking websites gave away many of the
Turkish preparations, including repeated
over ights of Syrian airspace in the
region by Turkish Air Force UAVs, believed
to be Turkish Aerospace Industries
(TAI) Ankas.
Recent events in Syria and Iraq have
shown air power being used in innovative
ways by all parties, proving the maxim
that, ‘air power in the 21st century comes
in many shapes and sizes’.FIGHTING ISLAMIC STATE | COMBAT REPORT
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