Given a free choice, would you prefer to hold a coastal strip, a port and a capital, or the hinterland and no obvious LOC? If I read the map correctly Syrian Army, Red, holds the high value cards.
The only thing of value that the Syrian government earned foreign currency from was oil. And ISIS hold all of them.....
There is always a buyer, and a lot of the air effort is going into shutting down the export routes - not with a great deal of excess.
Who Is Buying The Islamic State’s Illegal Oil?
...........The size of the group’s bank account has now risen to an estimated $2 billion dollars, thanks in part to revenues from ransom paid for kidnapped foreigners and more pillaging. However, oil remains the group’s primary source of income.
The 11 oil fields that IS controls in Iraq and Syria have made it a largely independent financial machine. Reports show that IS-controlled fields in Iraq produce between 25,000 and 40,000 barrels of oil per day, at an estimated value of approximately $1.2 million, before being smuggled out to Iran, Kurdistan, Turkey and Syria........
What’s more, now that it controls fertile provinces in western Iraq, such as Anbar and Nineveh, the group also now sits on 40 percent of Iraq’s wheat crop, and can force farmers to deal only with them, sometimes for no pay......