Turkish President Erdogan has challenged Putin and said he will step down if Russian claims that Turkey buys oil from Daesh are proved.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Russian Federation of slander for its allegations that Turkey and Erdogan’s family are buying oil from Islamic State (IS) militants. Terrorists use that money to plan attacks against us, France, Mali and others.
In response, Turkey has slammed the Russian claims as “slander” and challenged Russia to produce hard evidence that proves any link.
The State Department’s Toner said USA information was that Daesh was selling oil at the wellheads to middlemen who were involved in smuggling it across the frontier into Turkey.
A war plane crashes in flames in a mountainous area in northern Syria after it was shot down by Turkish fighter jets near the Turkish-Syrian border on Nov 24, 2015.
With tensions riding high between Moscow and Ankara following Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian warplane on the Syrian border, Davutoglu said Moscow was again behaving in the same way.
Turkish PM Ahmet Davutoglu dismissed it as “Soviet propaganda” and that nobody believes what Russian Federation says.
Antonov didn’t provide any specific evidence to back up the claims of personal involvement of Erdogan and his family in the oil trade with the IS. Allah knows why they did it (shoot down the Russian jet).
In his first state of the nation address after Russian Federation launched military intervention in Syria against ISIS, Vladimir Putin kept his focus on Turkey rather than terrorism.
Putin announced this week that Russia’s punishment of Turkey will not stop at trade sanctions, suggesting that the Middle Eastern country will pay for its alleged transgression in a more serious way. “We will reveal it to the world”.
The defence ministry cited satellite images that it said showed oil tankers travelling from IS-held territory to Turkey.
He didn’t even seem too anxious about Moscow’s latest military intervention in Syria against the Islamic State terrorist group.
Antonov claimed that Islamic State militants make $2 billion a year from the illegal oil trade.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that if the Russians are really concerned about illicit IS financing, they should take it up with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
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Turkey would have cause to regret its actions “more than once”, he said, promising Russia’s retaliatory actions would be neither hysterical nor risky.
