Saudis Giving Millions to Erdogan, ‘West’ Blocking Russia in UNSC from Stopping ISIS Oil Smuggling from Iraq, Syria into Turkey
The Unhived Mind
Saudis Giving Millions to Erdogan, ‘West’ Blocking Russia in UNSC from Stopping ISIS Oil Smuggling from Iraq, Syria into Turkey
August 1, 2014 • 10:35AM
http://larouchepac.com/node/31455
It has been confirmed that Saudi Arabia has been giving millions of dollars to President Barack Obama’s favorite helper in the destruction of the Middle East, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Today’s Zaman reports that the chairwoman of the Turkish Foundation for Youth and Education in Turkey (TÜRGEV), Arzu Akalin, has admitted that Saudi King Abdullah sent a donation of nearly $100 million to the foundation, of which Prime Minister Erdogan’s son Bilal and daughter Esra are executive board members.
Last December 17, Turkish prosecutors identified this payment as a bribe that was given to allow a Saudi company to construct a large real estate project on valuable property in Istanbul, where Erdogan used to be mayor. This was part of one of the corruption investigations that identified four government ministers as taking bribes; the investigations were later sabotaged under orders from Erdogan. In any case, Akalin claimed the payment to be legal.
This Saudi payment was merely a small part of the hundreds of millions of dollars of Saudi money that has poured into Turkey Erdogan’s government has been acting as a subcontractor for the Anglo-Sunni alliance that has been financing the jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq.
In a related development, following pressure from Russia, the United Nations has warned Ankara to stop supporting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) by selling and profiting from smuggled Syrian and Iraqi oil, especially in the wake of the ISIS takeover of Mosul, Iraq. The crude oil extracted in the Mosul area is transported to northern Iraq by smugglers and to into then Turkey and Iran. ISIS is believed to be earning $1 million per day by underselling the oil at $18 a barrel, as against the central Iraqi government price of $62.
Russian officials have observed this oil traffic for quite some time and had tried to stop it during a meeting of the UN Security Council, but were blocked by Western objections, at the time, that the trafficking helped finance the (al-Qaeda-linked) “moderate” jihadis they were backing to fight the Syrian government of Bashar Assad. Now, however, ISIS’s invasion has proved the gravity of the threat, according to the Turkish Aydinlik Daily. In Syria, ISIS controls the al-Omar oilfield in eastern Syria from which its smuggles oil into Turkey to sell. It has even constructed pipelines for this purpose. MP Mehmet Ali Ediboglu of the main Turkish opposition People’s Republic Party had claimed that ISIS has sold $800 million worth of oil in Turkey.