Ankara's oil business with ISIS

[EAsian]

Moscow has accused Turkey of helping Islamic State in the illegal oil trade which helps finance the terrorist group. According to analysts, Russian airstrikes in Syria are disrupting the profitable deals for Turkish middlemen, including Ankara officials.
Turkish social media has posted photos of Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s son Necmettin Bilal having dinner in an Istambul restaurant with an alleged ISIS leader, who it is claimed participated in massacres in Syria’s Homs and Rojava, the Kurdish name for Syrian Kurdistan or Western Kurdistan.

@lknurYB bilal erdoğan'ın ışid lideriyle yemek yeme fotosu pic.twitter.com/mc2HxYMRVo

— Dr. murat onay (@Drmuratonay) June 11, 2014
There is speculation Bilal Erdogan is directly involved in the black market oil business with Islamic State.


“IS has big money, hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, from selling oil. In addition they are protected by the military of an entire nation. One can understand why they are acting so boldly and blatantly. Why they kill people in such atrocious ways. Why they commit terrorist acts across the world, including in the heart of Europe,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, after a Turkish F16 downed a Russian Su-24 jet near the Turkish-Syrian border.

Last October, the US Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen said Islamic State was earning $1 million a day from oil sales. “According to our information, as of last month, ISIL [now more commonly known as ISIS] was selling oil at substantially discounted prices to a variety of middlemen, including some from Turkey, who then transported the oil to be resold. It also appears that some of the oil emanating from territory where ISIL operates has been sold to Kurds in Iraq, and then resold into Turkey,” he said.

According to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the middlemen in Turkey are not only entrepreneurs, but are Ankara officials. Turkey is protecting Islamic State because of “direct financial interest of some Turkish officials relating to the supply of oil products refined by plants controlled by ISIS.”

Russian political analyst Igor Yushkov from the National Energy Security Fund said Moscow’s anti-terror operation in Syria makes such business much more difficult.

“Nowadays the truck columns have to disperse and their payload has grown smaller. Before the operation buyers would visit the oilfields themselves, now they have had to organize a new cluster,” he told Gazeta.ru. He added that oil extraction will decrease because ISIS lacks qualified specialists.

A member of the expert council of the Russian Oil Industry Union Eldar Kasayev said Islamic State is selling oil at $15–25 per barrel, which is much cheaper than the Brent benchmark, trading at $45-50.

"By reselling it, Ankara has the opportunity to earn extra income and continue to bomb the Kurds, saying its bombing radicals,” he said.
Ankara's oil business with ISIS — RT Business

 

[EAsian]

Is Turkey Buying Oil From ISIS? After Downed Plane, Putin Slams Islamic State's Black Market Fuel Sales
The fact that Turkey shot down a Russian plane is not the only reason Russian President Vladimir Putin is furious. Since the jet fighter was downed Tuesday near the Syria-Turkey border, Putin has reiterated concerns -- already raised by other countries -- that Turkey has been buying oil smuggled from the Islamic State group.

The terrorist organization, also known as ISIS, has wrested control of oil fields in Iraq and eastern Syria, and has managed to keep production up despite both Russian- and American-led airstrikes against those targets.

"[ISIS] has big money, hundreds of millions -- or even billions -- of dollars, from selling oil," Putin said Tuesday, Russian news agency RT reported. "In addition, they are protected by the military of an entire nation. One can understand why they are acting so boldly and blatantly."

Turkey is frequently cited as one of the primary destinations for ISIS' oil. As a result, tensions between Russia and Turkey over the matter might seem inevitable. Russia's own economy has been hurt by a drastic drop in global oil prices -- by more than half in the past year, to less than $50 a barrel -- and by Western sanctions for Russia's involvement in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Oil is vital to Russia's economy; more than half of its budget and a quarter of its GDP come from producing and exporting oil and natural gas.

This month the Guardian reported that ISIS controlled about six locations that produced oil. The group reportedly sold the oil to Kurdish traders in Iraqi Kurdistan, who in turn sold it to traders in Turkey and Iran.

Oil infrastructure allegedly controlled by ISIS is hit by a Russian airstrike at an unknown location in Syria, Nov. 18, 2015. Reuters/Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation/Handout via Reuters

In June 2014, Ali Edibogluan, a member of parliament with Turkey's main opposition Republican People’s Party, said that ISIS had smuggled $800 million worth of oil into Turkey from Syria and Iraq, Al Monitor reported. He pointed to the Rumaila oil fields in northern Syria as well as those near Mosul, Iraq, saying that the group had laid pipes that allowed it to "transfer the oil to Turkey and parlay it into cash." Edibogluan added, "Turkey’s cooperation with thousands of men of such a mentality is extremely dangerous."

Russia has recently sought to destroy the infrastructure that allows ISIS to transport and sell oil. The Russian air force said last week it had destroyed about 500 fuel tankers, "which greatly reduced illegal oil export capabilities of the militants and, accordingly, their income from oil smuggling,” said Col. Gen. Andrey Kartapolov, spokesman for Russia's General Staff, RT reported.

Oil generates about $40 million a month in revenue for ISIS, the U.S. Treasury Department has estimated, the New York Times reported in mid-November. Its ability to rake in funds by selling oil on illicit markets comes from taking advantage of a "long-standing and deeply rooted black market," said David Cohen, U.S. undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, as quoted in the Financial Times in October 2014.

The tensions between Turkey and Russia come amid troubled negotiations over TurkStream, a pipeline that would have transported Russian natural gas into southern Europe by way of Turkey. Talks for that began to fall apart in October, when Gazprom, Russia's state-owned energy company, said it would cut the amount of gas going through the pipeline by half, delaying the pipeline's opening until the end of 2017. It decided to make the cut in order to divert part of the gas supply to a separate pipeline that would not go through Turkey and that it planned to expand.

"Turkish motivations to secure TurkStream are fairly urgent, as domestic energy demand is surging and internal energy sources are extraordinarily limited," according to a recent analysis of the situation by the publication Global Risk Insights. "Turkey also recognizes Russia’s desperation and is now likely to seek lucrative price cuts on Russian gas imports in exchange for greenlighting the pipeline," it added.

Of the crude oil Turkey consumed in 2014, about 27 percent came from Iraq, 26 percent from Iran and 13 percent from within Turkey, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. About 3 percent was imported from Russia.
Is Turkey Buying Oil From ISIS? After Downed Plane, Putin Slams Islamic State's Black Market Fuel Sales

Turkey has been buying Islamic State oil


Turkish oil trucks captured after ISIS withdrew from Base 121 Hasakah.


Turkey has been buying Islamic State oil | Defence blog