September 13:
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is struggling to cut off the millions of dollars in oil revenue that has made the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) one of the wealthiest terror groups in history, but so far has been unable to persuade Turkey, the NATO ally where much of the oil is traded on the black market, to crack down on an extensive sales network.
Western intelligence officials say they can track the ISIL oil shipments as they move across Iraq and into Turkey’s southern border regions. Despite extensive discussions inside the Pentagon, U.S. forces have so far not attacked the tanker trucks, though a senior administration official said “that remains an option.”
In public, the administration has been unwilling to criticize Turkey, which insists it has little control over the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria across its borders, or the flow of oil back out. One senior official, calling President Obama’s recent conversations with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “sensitive,” said the decisions about what the country will do to counter ISIL “will be theirs to make.”
But behind the scenes, the conversations about the Sunni extremist group’s ability to gather vast sums to finance its operations have become increasingly tense.
Access to cash critical
Turkey’s failure thus far to help choke off the oil trade symbolizes the magnitude of the challenge facing the administration in starving its lifeblood. ISIL’s access to cash is critical to its ability to recruit members, meet its growing payroll of fighters, expand its reach and operate across the territory of two countries.
“Turkey in many ways is a wild card in this coalition equation,” said Juan Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of “Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare.”
“It’s a great disappointment: There is a real danger that the effort to degrade and destroy [ISIL] is at risk,” Zarate said. “You have a major NATO ally, and it is not clear they are willing and able to cut off flows of funds, fighters and support to [ISIL].”
Turkey declined to sign a communiqué on Thursday in Saudi Arabia that committed Persian Gulf states to counter ISIL, even limited to the extent each nation considered “appropriate.” Turkish officials told their U.S. counterparts that with 49 Turkish diplomats being held as hostages in Iraq, they could not risk taking a public stance.
Still, administration officials say they believe Turkey could substantially disrupt the cash flow to ISIL if it tried.
“Like any sort of black market smuggling operation, if you devote the resources and the effort to attack it, you are unlikely to eradicate it, but you are likely to put a very significant dent in it,” a senior administration official said Saturday.
A second senior official said that Obama’s national security team had spoken several times with Erdogan and other top Turkish officials in the past two weeks about what they can do to help counter ISIL, and that the ISIL’s financing was part of those discussions.
“Stopping the flow of foreign fighters, border security and dismantling ISIL funding networks are also key aspects of our strategy, and we will continue to work closely with Turkey and our other partners in the region on these efforts in the days ahead,” the official said.
Source: http://www.startribune.com/world/275023191.html
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