ISIS raise $1 million a day selling crude oil from captured Iraqi oilfields (shortened)

ISIS are making nearly $1million a day selling off crude oil from conquered refineries to Kurdish businessmen.

The jihadists, who now call themselves the Islamic State's caliphate, are smuggling the resources from Iraqi oilfields into Turkey and Iran where they offer it up for $25 (£15) a barrel, making a huge profit.

The lucrative trade was revealed as the Iraqi government were accused of killing 255 Sunni prisoners as revenge for the ISIS advance, which has seen them take large swathes of the country.

Industry experts believe the fighters are taking the oil from plains south of Mosul and transporting it in tankers, owned by the extremists, so it can be turned into diesel and petrol.

$25 (£15) a barrel

If the world avoids buying KRG oil exported via Turkey how come ISIS can freely sell oil? Looks like the difference is ISIS is selling locally blackmarket by the barrel.

From an Internet source a few weeks ago: "Baghdad says the semiautonomous northern Iraqi enclave of Kurdistan can't legally export its crude without going through the federal government in Baghdad. The Kurdistan Regional Government . . . started piping oil from Kurdistan to Turkey for eventual export by tanker. [The first shipment left] the Turkish port of Ceyhan . . . Baghdad immediately threatened to take legal action against anyone who bought the shipment. Since then, it has remained unclear who bought the cargo, where it was headed and whether any government would allow for it to be unloaded amid Iraq's threats."

Can’t tell who the players are without a score card...

Now let’s see, this ISIS bunch are presumed to be Sunnis, right? And the Muslim Brotherhood, the ones that gave the franchise to al-Qaeda, they are also Sunni? The ISIS is WAY more radical than most anybody who has yet come along, and they seem to be driven by some pretty big egos. Like forming a caliphate, and inviting all Muslims to join into it. This should sit so well with the Shi’ites, of which in southern Iraq and all of Iran, are much in the majority. But wait, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, now isn’t he Shi’ite? And isn’t that where most of the sectarian disagreement in Iraq springs from, the fact that al-Maliki was “democratically” elected, i.e., that there were WAY more Shi’ites voting than Sunnis, and naturally, the vote went for the Shi’ite guy?

Sunnis are a definite minority within Iraq, as well as the Kurds, but the Kurds look at things much more pragmatically. The Kurds are doing business with BOTH sides, while probably despising them both, in approximately equal measure. Not to let that get in the way of turning a quick buck.

Now, all the while, the Current Occupant has been kind of favoring the Muslim Brotherhood, at the expense of the Shi’ites, as evidenced first in Egypt, then Libya, and more recently, in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad, while not himself a Shi’ite, has accepted the assistance of Iran sort of under the table. Most of the “liberation” forces are Sunni, or of some connection with the Muslim Brotherhood, so this would be a sort of proxy war going on between the Sunnis, as represented by ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and in a less distinguished role, the Current Occupant now squatting in the White Hut, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, representing the Shi’ites.

The royal house of Saud does not have clean hands here, not at all. Mostly much too sophisticated and urbane to soil themselves in anything like actual engagement in combat, they have been financing both the US military as a sort of surrogate mercenary army, and the Sunni “freedom fighters” with the Muslim Brotherhood and their various franchise groups. But even the Saudis have found it necessary to protect their very personal hides by putting some of their own troops on the Iraqi border, because the Iraqi army is no longer able to maintain that commitment. And the Americans have abandoned the region.

The pin on the grenade has been pulled, dropped and lost in the dirt, and the hand of its holder grows weary....

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