Searching by title can provide link to the full text document:
Posted on 09/17/2014 5:34:46 AM PDT by thackney
The Islamic State is funding its rapid push into Syria and Iraq with a labyrinthine oil-smuggling operation that starts at seized Syrian oil fields, goes through makeshift refineries and can end up in jerrycans carried by mules into the hilly borderland of Turkey.
Amid Western pressure to squeeze the group's finances, Turkey is expanding efforts to crack down on the increasingly organized business, which is now generating an estimated $2 million a day.
A major route linking Syrian oil fields with the smuggling enclaves of southern Turkey offers a window onto the complexity of the oil network run by Islamic State, the militant group that controls large swaths of Syria and Iraq. It also demonstrates the challenges of shutting it down.
"It clearly won't be possible to choke off completely," said David Butter, a Middle East economy expert at the U.K. think tank Chatham House.
The route begins with oil fields run just a few years ago by Western energy giants and now controlled, along with fuel-smuggling operations in Syria, by the Islamic State.
The militants truck oil drawn from those fields or stolen from pipelines to rudimentary refineries, according to Syrian human-rights activists, Western and Turkish government officials, and a Syrian businessman involved in the trade.
The refined products are sent to the Turkish frontier, where they're hauled over the border by trucks, horses or mules, according to these accounts. Fuel has also been floated across rivers on rafts or pumped through underground pipelines before finding its way to markets across southern Turkey.
Initially, Turkey largely turned a blind eye to the illicit fuel trade, which ramped up at the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011 along smuggling routes that have existed for decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Searching by title can provide link to the full text document:
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.