(TASS) The financial royalties the terrorist group calling itself the Islamic State (outlawed in Russia) gets from trade in crude oil has shrunk considerably since 2015, which is largely an effect of the counter-terrorist operation by Russia’s Aerospace Force in Syria, Russia’s deputy UN envoy Yevgeny Zagainov told a Security Council briefing on terrorist attacks that endanger international peace and security.
“According to the information at our disposal the Islamic State’s oil revenue has been down to $12 million – $25 million a month, which is a tiny one-third of what the Islamic State was getting in 2015,” he said.
“It is effective operations by Russia’s aerospace group in the course of the anti-terrorist campaign in Syria that have allowed for achieving such results,” Zagainov said.
According to the latest statistics, since the moment Russia began the operation in Syria a total of 4,000 tank trucks of the Islamic State have been destroyed and 206 oil and gas production facilities put out of order.
Zagainov said the latest report by the UN Secretary-General, too, contained the conclusion that the terrorists’ incomes were shrinking.
“At first sight it might seem that UN Security Council’s mechanisms for struggle against the financing of terrorism have begun to work at full capacity at last, but such evaluation would be too optimistic,” Zagainov said, adding that “far from all states are serious about their commitments in that respect.”
The decline in the Islamic State’s incomes, he said, is “first and foremost a result of terrorists’ military defeats.”
At the same time, said Zagainov, the sources of the Islamic State’s budget have remained basically unchanged – trade in hydrocarbons and requisitions from the civilian population in the controlled territories.
“It is obvious that time is ripe for the UN Security Council to enhance its set of sanctions with the aim to quash the Islamic State financially and economically,” Zagainov said.
He warned that not a single state is secure from radicalization of the population, attacks by individual terrorists and the emergence of “sleeping cells” and full-scale chapters of major terrorist organizations.
“Only creation of an integral anti-terrorist front protecting the common values enshrined in the UN Charter is capable of stopping the Islamic State’s geographic expansion,” he stated.
Uprooted Palestinian 
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