Free Republic

Islamic State was selling oil and gas to the Syrian regime and to Turkey, while the militants were ruling over large areas in Syria and Iraq over the past three years, a senior ISIS commander said in an interview with the Kurdistan 24 news outlet on Sunday. “Oil and gas obtained by the Islamic State was sold to Turkey and the Syrian regime,” Razeek Radeek Maksimo, an Azerbaijani national and formerly senior ISIS commander, told Kurdistan 24 from a prison in Rojava where he is held by Syrian Kurdish authorities.

On Monday, Turkey’s sultan President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said something funny. In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s contention that Russia has additional proof of Turkey’s participation in Islamic State’s illicit crude trade, Erdogan said he would resign if anyone could prove the accusations. Now obviously, conclusive evidence that Ankara is knowingly facilitating the sale of ISIS crude will probably be hard to come by, at least in the short-term, but the silly thing about Erdogan’s pronouncement is that we’re talking about a man who was willing to plunge his country into civil war over a few lost seats in Parliament....

"I've shown photos taken from space and from aircraft which clearly demonstrate the scale of the illegal trade in oil and petroleum products," Vladimir Putin told reporters earlier this month on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Antalya. Putin was of course referencing Islamic State's illicit and highly lucrative oil trade, the ins and outs of which we've documented extensively over the past two weeks:

On the outskirts of al-Omar oilfield in eastern Syria, with warplanes flying overhead, a line of trucks stretches for 6km. Some drivers wait for a month to fill up with crude.[...] This is the land of Isis, the jihadi organisation in control of swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory. The trade in oil has been declared a prime target by the international military coalition fighting the group. And yet it goes on, undisturbed.[...] But more than a year after US President Barack Obama launched an international coalition to fight Isis, the bustling trade at al-Omar and at least eight other...

AMMAN (Reuters) - Islamic State fighters have seized the last major oilfield under Syrian government control during battles over a vast central desert zone, a group monitoring the conflict said on Monday. The Jazal field was now shut down and clashes were ongoing east of Homs, with casualties reported on both sides, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, without giving dates or more details. Syria's army said it had repulsed an attack in the same area but did not mention Jazal or comment on how much of the country's battered energy infrastructure remained under its sway. It said...

The fall of the al-Jazal oil field in the Homs province came after intense fighting with government troops, Xinhua quoted the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights as saying. ... The government had already lost the oil and gas fields in Deir al-Zour. Kurdish militants in northern Syria also control the country's largest Rmailan oil field. Clashes are still raging near the field, the Observatory said. The oil industry had been a pillar of the Syrian economy until the crisis broke out more than three years ago, with a daily output of about 380,000 barrels. ...

As the bloc’s 12 oil ministers meet in Vienna, the march of Isil jihadists in the Middle East is putting Iran and Saudi Arabia on a collision course with explosive consequences Thick black smoke rising from the Baiji oil refinery could be seen as a dirty smudge on the horizon as far away as Baghdad after fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) set fire to the enormous processing plant just over 100 miles north of the capital last week. The decision to torch the refinery, which once produced around a third of Iraq’s domestic fuel...

Meet your new bosses: ISIS is looking to recruit a skilled manager to run its faltering illegal oil businessISIS is on the lookout for a skilled professional to manage its failing oil refineries and has been using black-market agents to advertise the £140,000-a-year post. The terror group is said to have captured at least 11 oil fields in Iraq and Syria during its offensive campaign and was thought to be making around £2million-a-day from sales in June. But a string of fatal accidents and a lack of ideological commitment from trained engineers has seen its profits slump by more than...

"Islamic State makes not less than $2 million daily that allows them to pay salaries and maintain their operations," said a former Western oil executive who worked in a foreign oil firm operating in Syria before the crisis and who is familiar with the nascent oil market. The United States, which has been bombing Islamic State positions in Iraq, has said it is prepared to extend the campaign into Syria, which has been racked by civil war for more than three years, and has said it will train more than 5,000 Syrian rebel fighters to counter the advancing group. But...

President Obama, laying out his strategy last night to defeat the Islamist jihadists known as ISIS, stressed that “it will take time to eradicate a cancer” such as the terrorist group represents in the Middle East. One hurdle in the way of Obama’s intention to work with allies to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS (also known as ISIL and the Islamic State) is the brutal organization’s control of oil fields in Iraq and Syria. ISIS uses that oil wealth to help finance its terror operations. According to the Iraq Energy Institute, an independent, nonprofit policy organization focused on Iraq’s energy...