“A quick look at a map suggests that the overwhelming bulk of oil smuggled out of Syria and Iraq must go to Turkey,” retired Canadian diplomat Patrick Armstrong said.
“Judging from the number of trucks shown, it must be quite large-scale and surely constitutes the large majority of Daesh’s’ funding.”
The huge scale of the smuggling and the historical efficiency of Turkey’s border controls mean that the Turkish government and armed forces are almost certain to be well aware of the trade, Armstrong continued.
“At a border that's always been well-controlled, at a time when both Syria and Iraq are in war, involving this many trucks? Hardly possible. Small scale, perhaps; on this scale, impossible,” he stated.
Armstrong, who was a counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, said he has seen no hard evidence had yet emerged that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or any of his family members or close associates were making profits from the trade.
But Armstrong said he could not exclude the possibility such evidence might soon emerge.
“Are Erdogan or his family involved? No evidence yet from the Russians, but they promise more coming. My guess is that they do have the evidence or they would not have said what they did,” he explained.
US officials at different times have given different reasons for not trying to bomb or otherwise interdict the Islamic State oil trade across the Turkish border, Armstrong pointed out.
Retired US Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Major Todd Pierce, an expert on guerilla war, told Sputnik that US failure to act decisively against the smuggling of Islamic State oil through Turkey reflected the confusion and ignorance of Washington and military policymakers.
“Having broken up the region in the first place with the Iraq War, we now have the ‘neighbors’ swooping in to pick up the pieces and our experts don't have the depth of thinking to understand the complexities of the situation and the conflicting motives and objectives of those we see as our allies,” Pierce said.
The Daesh had thrived thanks to the failure of US policymakers to understand the interests of the Turkish military and other forces in the region to support the Islamic State or collude with it for their own reasons, Pierce maintained.
“That has been the failure of US policy in the region leading to the growth of the Islamic State,” Pierce argued.
Obama administration planners still lacked any understanding of the true nature of the conflict, an aspect that German war theorist Carl von Clausewitz identified as the essential element necessary to get right if there was to be any chance of success, Pierce concluded.
