Iraqi Kurds Claim Russia is Lying on Turkey-Daesh Oil Trade + Oil Trade Exposed
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Daesh oil trade, which also involved Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, were denied by Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officials.
BabHasakah Province in northeastern Syria, and Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan on the Iraqi-Turkish border.
If you look at the map, it looks like ISIS is smuggling oil through Kurdish-controlled territories in both Iraq and Syria to Turkey,"
Wladimir van Wilgenburg, an analyst of Kurdish politics. are in fact carrying oil from the KRG to Ceyhan terminal in southern Turkey.
Russia's Defense Ministry earlier alleged that oil tankers loaded in Daesh-held territories are passing from territories controlled by the KRG and PYD to reach Turkey.
Speaking to Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency, Jawdat said the tankers belong to the KRG and Russia's claims are 'far from being true'.
"Our Natural Resources Ministry has earlier announced that hundreds of tankers are carrying oil from KRG to Turkey.
"Russia's explanations are based on wrong sources. We strongly reject Russian accusations," he said.
"Russia has no proof of any oil transactions between Turkey, the Kurdish region and Daesh," he added.
Russia has sanctioned Turkey over the incident, and Turkey has said it will cut its imports of Russian petroleum by 25% in 2016.
In June of 2014the first shipment of Kurdish pipeline oil was being unloaded in Israel.Turkish port of Ceyhan, designed to bypass Baghdad's federal pipeline system, has created a bitter dispute over oil sale rights between the central government and the Kurds.”
In their words, "it seems that whenever the Islamic State is fighting in the vicinity of an area hosting oil assets, the 13 exports from Ceyhan promptly spike.
Ceyhan is the port from which Kurdish oil (technically "illegal" to let Baghdad tell it) is transported, and as Kiourktsoglou and Coutroubis note,
"the quantities of crude oil that are being exported to the terminal in Ceyhan exceed the mark of one million barrels per day and given that ISIS has never been able to trade daily more than 45,000 barrels of oil, it becomes evident that the detection of similar quantities of smuggled crude cannot take place through stock-accounting methods." In other words, if ISIS oil was being shipped from Ceyhan, it would essentially be invisible.
Here's where things get interesting.
A few weeks ago, Reuters
released an exclusive report detailing how Erbil hides its crude shipments from Baghdad. Here are some of the details:
''Most customers were scared of touching it with Baghdad threatening to sue any buyer. Large oil companies - including Exxon Mobil and BP - have billions of dollars worth of joint projects with Baghdad.''
Some buyers took tankers to Ashkelon, Israel, where it was loaded into storage facilities to be resold later to buyers in Europe. Kurdish oil was also sold offshore Malta via ship-to-ship transfers helping disguise the final buyers and thus protect them from threats from Iraqi state firm SOMO.
It was a high stakes game. A ship would dock off Malta waiting for another to arrive to take a cargo to a final destination. Sometimes two ships would be sent - one sailing off empty and another full - to complicate cargo tracking.
"Everyone suddenly became a ship tracking expert. So we had to raise our game too ... But one thing was proven correct - when oil is out, it flows," said Hawrami.
the coast of Malta was used to get Kurdish crude to places like Israel. "Israeli refineries and oil companies imported more than 19m barrels of Kurdish oil between the beginning of May and August 11, according to shipping data, trading sources and satellite tanker tracking,"
That is the equivalent of about 77 per cent of average Israeli demand, which runs at roughly 240,000 barrels per day. More than a third of all of the northern Iraqi exports, which are shipped from Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, went to Israel over the period."
At this juncture, we begin to get an idea of what's going on here. Kurdish oil is already technically illegal and Turkey is happy to facilitate its trip to foreign buyers via Ceyhan. What better way for ISIS to get its own oil to market than by moving it through a port that already deals in suspect crude?
"After the oil is extracted and loaded, the oil tankers leave Nineveh province and head north to the city of Zakho, 88km north of Mosul," the colonel said. Zakho is a Kurdish city in Iraqi Kurdistan, right on the border with Turkey.
"After IS oil lorries arrive in Zakho - normally 70 to 100 of them at a time - they are met by oil smuggling mafias, a mix of Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, in addition to some Turks," the colonel continued.
"The person in charge of the oil shipment sells the oil to the highest bidder," the colonel added. Competition between organised gangs has reached fever pitch, and the assassination of mafia leaders has become commonplace.
The highest bidder pays between 10 and 25 percent of the oil's value in cash - US dollars
Once inside Turkey, IS oil is indistinguishable from oil sold by the Kurdistan Regional Government, as both are sold as "illegal", "source unknown" or "unlicensed" oil.
The companies that buy the KRG oil also buy IS-smuggled oil, according to the colonel.
In other words, Erdogan is already moving illicit crude from the KRG (with whom Ankara is friendly by the way, despite the fact that they are Kurds) via a son-in-law and in large quantities. What's to say he isn't moving ISIS crude via the same networks through his son Bilal? Or perhaps through his other son Burak who
Today's Zaman reminds us "also owns a fleet of ships [and] was featured in a report by the Sözcü daily in 2014 [when his] vessel Safran 1 was anchored in Israel's port of Ashdod."
"Israel has in one way or another become the main marketer of IS oil. Without them, most IS-produced oil would have remained going between Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Even the three companies would not receive the oil if they did not have a buyer in Israel," said the industry official.