Five airstrikes per day in Iraq: The latest breakdown on what has been hit

http://www.washingtonpost.com/five-airstrikes-per-day-in-iraq-the-latest-breakdown-on-what-has-been-hit/2014/09/09/98083ca7-477b-4307-9194-4c0ab5d9509f_story.html?wprss=rss_national-security

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The United States on Monday launched its 148th airstrike in Iraq since President Obama authorized strikes there a month ago. That works out to about five per day, a rate that has enabled U.S. forces to target a wide breadth of equipment, infrastructure and weapons controlled by militants with the Islamic State.

Checkpoint has been compiling a running tally of the damage, as first noted in this Aug. 26 blog post. You can view it here on Google Docs. Monday marked one month since the first airstrike, which occurred Aug. 8. Since then, a partial list of the targets hit include:

At least 83 armed vehicles or trucks Videos released by U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. operations in the Middle East, suggest that these are probably mostly or entirely pickup trucks armed with machine guns or other heavy weapons. They’re sometimes called “technicals,” CENTCOM says. Here are two examples:

At least 39 Humvees Most of these were likely confiscated from the Iraqi military after its troops fled their bases earlier this year in the face of an Islamic State assault. Fifteen Humvees have been hit in airstrikes since Sept. 5, CENTCOM officials say.

At least 11 armored personnel carriers The Islamic State’s use of armored personnel carriers — perhaps M113 vehicles delivered by the United States — have been destroyed numerous times, highlighting that militants aren’t just rolling around Iraq in pickup trucks and Humvees, but larger vehicles as well. The U.S. has released at least one video of a strike on an APC:

Anti-aircraft weapons The U.S. military has hit vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft artillery guns three times within the last week, and at least four times in all. The U.S. military has not specified which kind they were, but militants in Iraq have been seen in their own propaganda videos rolling around with powerful 12.7mm DShK machine guns and what appears to be 37mm twin-barreled anti-aircraft weapons, as noted in this previous Checkpoint piece.