Turkey says it has seized over 80 million litres of oil originating from the oil wells controlled by the ISIS group in Iraq and Syria.
This instance shows the terrorist outfit is profiting from the nefarious oil business.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mouloud Jawish Ihsanoglu confirmed the seizure. "Since the beginning of this year, turkey confiscated 80 million liters of oil coming from the wells controlled by ISIS," Ihsanoglu was quoted as saying by a local Iraqi News website.
The minister -- echoing the general response from the government – has denied that Turkey bought oil sold by ISIS, instead he claims that Turkish authorities have discovered and destroyed many of the oil pipelines built across the Syrian-Turkish border by the jihadist outfit, which has been making its money mostly from oil from refineries it has captured in Iraq and Syria.
It has been reported that over the last few months the outfit has turned oil into a booming business to fund its terrorist activities. They sold oil at prices as low as $20 per barrel -- a discount of around 75 percent. The militants make more than $1 million a day selling oil from fields captured in eastern Syria although how exactly this shadowy trade works remains largely unknown, reported Buzz Feed in November this year.
However, the fact that the ISIS-stolen oil from Syria went into Turkish soil had been widely reported and known ever since the group captured parts of north Iraq and Syria. After ISIS extracted oil from inside Syria, middlemen delivered it to the Syrian border near the Turkish area, Besaslan.
There, the oil was pumped into pipes buried underground, according to some reports. On the other end of the pipes, middlemen and traders in Besaslan filled new drums of the oil. They then bought the oil from the lot before delivering it to the local Turkish businessmen, who sold it secretly to gas stations or built makeshift and secret filling stations.
Turkey has been a focal point in the ongoing international fight against the deadly crimes of the extremist group, which has beheaded and executed a numbers of innocent people. Its porous, 565-mile border has been widely reported to be a gateway for the foreign extremists to join the organisation. Also, since the price of oil in Turkey is sky-high, the country has been a key market for the illegal oil that funds ISIS.
