Turkish middlemen involved in ISIL black market oil sales, US says

Sally

Gold Member
Mar 22, 2012
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Hmm, looks like some Turks have no qualms in helping ISIS make money to carry on their savage behavior against innocent people.

Turkish middlemen involved in ISIL black market oil sales, US says
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October 24, 2014, Friday/ 14:37:18/ TODAY'S ZAMAN WITH AP / ISTANBUL




The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is selling oil at substantially discounted prices to a variety of middlemen, including some from Turkey, who then transport the oil to be resold, a US Treasury Department official said Thursday.

"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," David Cohen, who leads the department's effort to undermine the ISIL's finances, said. Cohen said the Syrian government also has allegedly arranged to buy oil from ISIL. The official added that the ISIL militants are amassing wealth at an unprecedented pace, earning about $1 million a day from black market oil sales alone.

Cohen said the extremists also get several million dollars a month from wealthy donors, extortion rackets and other criminal activities, such as robbing banks. In addition, he said the group has taken in at least $20 million in ransom payments this year from kidnappings. "With the important exception of some state-sponsored terrorist organizations, ISIL is probably the best-funded terrorist organization we have confronted," Cohen, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "It has amassed wealth at an unprecedented pace." The group, which extracts oil from territory it has captured across Syria and Iraq, wants to create a caliphate, or Islamic empire, in the Middle East. Led by Iraqi militant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State initially tried to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad, but other groups, including al-Qaida central command, turned against ISIL because of its brutality. Unlike the core al-Qaida terrorist network, ISIL gets only a small share of funding from deep-pocket donors and therefore does not depend primarily on moving money across international borders. Instead, the ISIL group obtains the vast majority of its revenues through local criminal and terrorist activities, Cohen said, acknowledging that Treasury's tool are not particularly well-suited to combating extortion and local crime. "They rob banks. They lay waste to thousands of years of civilization in Iraq and Syria by looting and selling antiquities," he said. "They steal livestock and crops from farmers. And despicably, they sell abducted girls and women as sex slaves."

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Turkish middlemen involved in ISIL black market oil sales US says?
 

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