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23 ISIL militants killed in 16 airstrikes in Raqqa

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33401251

Is it just me or is this bombing campaign the biggest waste of money since they invaded Iraq? those bombs cost several hundred thousand a pop and are doing absolutely nothing... isn't it time for a change in tactics? For instance carpet bombing the city back the stone age.

Reply 1

Illiberal Liberal

Given that Raqqa has a massive civilian population that are essentially being held hostage by IS I'm going to have to disagree with your proposal to carpet bomb the city 'back [to] to the Stone Age'...

Reply 2

flibber

They'll do something as the Kurds and FSA advance. So they'll be doing something in making the city be taken with less difficulty when that time comes.

Reply 3

Soldieroffortune

Original post by Law-Hopeful

I wasn't being entirely serious with that.

Never the less who's to say the majority are being held hostage and arent with ISIL? Either way like those in Mosul god help if the local army ever retakes the city as they'll all die.

Reply 4

RF_PineMarten

The bombs cost a lot of money each. But it's worth it to be able to hit ISIS from the air without having to send our own soldiers in, and without causing too many civilian casualties (the bombs are expensive because they're guided/precision bombs). These expensive bombs are well worth the cost.

Bombing works fine, it's just that we don't have a decent ground force except the Kurds. The Kurds in Syria and Iraq fight well and have taken important territory from the group, proving that air strikes combined with a decent ground force can be
effective. But the Kurds won't go too far beyond the Kurdish areas into the Sunni Arab areas.

The Iraqi army is a mess and the Shia militias are problematic due to sectarianism. In Syria it's complicated by our opposition to the Syrian government and the dominance of Islamists among the rebels - so there isn't a clear reliable partner we could back militarily to fight ISIS in Sunni Arab areas. We could back non-Islamist rebels or the Syrian government to fight ISIS in those areas, but there are problems with both.

That's the problem - the lack of a decent ground force to take on ISIS (outside of the Kurdish areas of both Iraq and Syria). The problem lies with that, not with the air strikes.