ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Over the course of the last four or so weeks, the media has paid quite a bit of attention to Islamic State’s lucrative trade in “stolen” crude. On November 16, in a highly publicized effort, US warplanes destroyed 116 ISIS oil trucks in Syria. 45 minutes prior, leaflets were dropped advising drivers (who Washington is absolutely sure are not ISIS members themselves) to “get out of [their] trucks and run away.” The peculiar thing about the US strikes is that it took The Pentagon nearly 14 months to figure out that the most effective way to cripple Islamic State’s oil trade is to bomb… the oil. Prior to November, the US “strategy” revolved around bombing the group’s oil infrastructure. As it turns out, that strategy was minimally effective at best and it’s not entirely clear that an effort was made to inform The White House, Congress, and/or the public about just how little damage the airstrikes were actually inflicting. There are two possible explanations as to why Centcom may have so

As we pointed out a week ago, even before the downing of the Russian jet by a Turkish F-16, the most important question that nobody had asked about ISIS is where is the funding for the terrorist organization coming from, and more importantly, since everyone tacitly knows where said funding is coming from (as we have revealed in an ongoing series of posts “Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey’s President”, “How Turkey Exports ISIS Oil To The World: The Scientific Evidence” and “ISIS Oil Trade Full Frontal: “Raqqa’s Rockefellers”, Bilal Erdogan, KRG Crude, And The Israel Connection”) few on the US-led Western Alliance have done anything to stop the hundreds of millions in oil sale proceeds from funding the world’s best organized terrorist group. We concluded by asking “how long until someone finally asks the all important question regarding the Islamic State: who is the commodity trader breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost

Two Turkish generals and a colonel were detained on Saturday for intercepting Syria-bound trucks that belonged to Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT), the newspaper Today’s Zaman reported. In January 2014, Ankara Gendarmerie Major-General Ibrahim Aydin, former Adana Gendarmerie Brigadier-General Hamza Celepoglu and former Gendarmerie Criminal Laboratory Head Colonel Burhanettin Cihangiroglu stopped Syrian-bound trucks in southern Turkey after they received information from an anonymous source that the trucks were illegally carrying weapons to militants in Syria. When the information about the trucks became public, MIT officials and high-ranking Turkish politicians, including President Recep Teyyip Erdogan, who was Prime Minister back then, and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, then the country’s foreign minister, were furious that the gendarmes stopped the trucks and said the Syria-bound trucks were carrying “humanitarian aid” to Turkmen living just south of Turkey, the new

Terroist group Islamic State earns millions of dollars selling oil on the black market in Turkey, Iraqi MP and former national security adviser, Mowaffak al Rubaie told RT. He also revealed that wounded terrorists are being treated in Turkish hospitals. “In the last eight months ISIS has managed to sell ... $800 million dollars worth of oil on the black market of Turkey. This is Iraqi oil and Syrian oil, carried by trucks from Iraq, from Syria through the borders to Turkey and sold ...[at] less than 50 percent of the international oil price,” Mowaffak al Rubaie said in an interview with RT. “Now this either get consumed inside, the crude is refined on Turkish territory by the Turkish refineries, and sold in the Turkish market. Or it goes to Jihan and then in the pipelines from Jihan to the Mediterranean and sold to the international market.” “Money and dollars generated by selling Iraqi and Syrian oil on the Turkish black market is like the oxygen supply to ISIS and it’s operation,”

A large cargo of shotguns without transportation permits has been seized by the Italian police at the Port of Trieste. The 847 Turkish-made Winchester shotguns worth about €500,000 were on their way to Belgium. The weapons were declared along with other cargoes destined for Germany and the Netherlands on a Dutch-registered truck driven by a Turkish citizen. Gun shipments from Turkey are nothing new in Trieste, but this time the shipment was missing a key document: authorization for transportation in the EU. The shipment consisted of 847 pump-action Winchester shotguns: 781 SXP 12-51 and 66 SXP 12-47 models, La Stampa reports . Italian police seize 800 guns from Turkey Shipment of 800 guns coming from Turkey seized by Italian police. Final destination was Belgium. Posted by  RT Play  on 27 ноября 2015 г. “A major seizure,” the chief prosecutor of Trieste, Carlo Mastelloni, commented, stressing that the Guardia di Finanza (Financial Police) “have done well for encouraging

By Anastassios Adamopoulos - Following the controversial takedown of a Russian Air Force aircraft by Turkish F-16 authorities, Wikileaks has released figures on Turkish violations of Greek airspace. A Wikileaks tweet, citing data compiled by the University of Thessaly, based on Greek military records, alleges that Turkey violated Greek airspace 2,444 times in 2014 alone, while there are 636 such violations in 2013. A United States classified cable, also released by Wikileaks on Tuesday, reports that in June 2005, the then Greek Foreign Minister Petros Molyviatis told the American Ambassador that Turkish aircrafts did not have to fly 40 times per day over disputed airspace to get their political point across and could instead limit it down to one flight per week. Greek Foreign Affairs Minister Nikos Kotzias held a phone conversation with Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov on Tuesday evening, that included discussions on Tuesday’s incident as well as the war in Syria,

Are we at risk of being victims or casualties in a government cyberwar? In the first of this three-part series, we explore what the experts say about the current state of cyberwar -- and what it means to IT departments everywhere. Insider Threats: 10 Ways To Protect Your Data(Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Cyberwar is an ugly word, not only because of what it implies, but because the term is ill-defined. It's suggestive of digital attacks alone. That's simply not the case. It is far more likely that cyberattacks would be only one form of aggression in the otherwise familiar hells of war. The biggest question of all, for corporations and citizens alike, is: Are we here in the US simply in the midst of informal nation-state aggression, or are we in a full-fledged cyberwar? The distinction between the two situations may not matter for IT's purposes, since neither poses a serious threat to corporations. Nonetheless, it's important to understand the nature of th

A Russian Su-24 front-line bomber jet takes off at Latakia airport, Syria. © Dmitriy Vinogradov / Sputnik A Russian Su-24M tactical bomber was brought down over Syria by a Turkish Air Force fighter jet on Tuesday. Moscow and Ankara have put forward conflicting versions of what happened, and the circumstances of the crash remain under investigation. This is what is known so far. 1. The Russian jet went down at 9:30am local time on Tuesday “Today at 9:30 the Russian aircraft, which performed combat counterterrorist missions was shot down by an aircraft of the Turkish Air Force,” Russia's Ministry of Defense wrote on its official Facebook page. The ministry added that it considers the action of the Turkish Air Force to be an “unfriendly act.” Defence Attaché at the Embassy of the Republic of Turkey in Russia was urgently summoned to the Russian Ministry of...Posted by Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation on Tuesday, November 24, 2015 2. It crashed in a rebel-held area i