Russian President Vladimir Putin doubled down Thursday on accusing Turkey of complicity with terrorists and benefitting from the trade of oil stolen by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) terrorists, The State Department again defended Turkey’s president against allegations of collusion with ISIS.
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The spokesman advised the American side to have a look through the videos, which were also presented by the Russian Defense Ministry, showing how the tanker trucks not only drive through checkpoints at the Turkish border, but pass through them without even stopping. Turkey also announced that the government is working on some possible economic retaliation against Moscow.
Moscow has said that its warplanes have been targeting terrorist groups near Syria’s border with Turkey, while Ankara has said the Russian raids have been aimed at moderate militant groups made of ethnic Turks who oppose Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime. The shipments, they said, were forwarded on for further processing by companies controlled by Bilal Erdogan.
“In the Cold War period there was a Soviet propaganda machine”.
Speaking at a separate meeting honoring Russian military officers for their action in Syria, Putin said “positive things have happened there thanks to you and your comrades, who have been working in the air, and, in fact, have been leading the Syrian military units”.
Turkey maintains that the jet was warned over and over as it approached Turkish airspace but it ignored all warnings.
The senior official noted that to smuggle 20,000 barrels of oil into Turkey – which he described at “the low end for significant” volume – at least 1,000 would be employed to carry that amount of oil. “If such a thing is proven, the nobility of our nation would require that I would not stay in office”. “I will not remain in this post”, Erdogan said. It was all part of a familiar treacherous pattern that had seen Turkey finance terrorists in Russia’s North Caucasus during two violent separatist wars in the 1990s and early 2000s, he said.
Energy-hungry Turkey relies on Russian Federation for 55 per cent of its natural gas and 30 percent of its oil, but Erdogan indicated that Ankara is now seeking new suppliers in the wake of the plane crisis.
Antonov claims that Russian defense officials identified three main oil export routes to Turkey: one that leads westwards to Turkish ports on the Mediterranean Sea, one that goes north to the Batman refinery in the southeast of Turkey, and an eastwards route to a base in the town of Cizre (also in the southeast of the country).
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“Iran has a duty to reduce tensions between Russian Federation and Turkey and it’s not good to have another tension added to the existing ones in the region”, Ali Akbar Velayati, an advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was quoted as saying by the official Irna news agency.
