Things that make you go, "Hmmmmm...."
One thing's for sure: Nobody, but NOBODY, can "stir the pot" like Vladimir Putin:
Russia's defence ministry on Saturday accused the United States of turning a blind eye to the trafficking of oil into Turkey from Syrian areas under Islamic State control, after Washington called the amounts involved insignificant.
"When US officials say they don't see how the terrorists' oil is smuggled to Turkey... it smells badly of a desire to cover up these acts," the ministry said on its Facebook page.
"The declarations of the [Obam]agon and the State Department seem like a theatre of the absurd," the statement added, suggesting that Washington "watch the videos taken by its (own) drones which have recently been three times as numerous over the Turkey-Syria border and above the oil zones".
In the words of long-ago Seattle Seahawk offensive lineman Pete Kendall, "That's a fair question".
I speculated about possible Turkish-ISIS collusion on this very site over a year ago....:
The Turkish hostages in question were captured at their country's Mosul consulate when ISIS took the city back on June 11th. They've ostensibly been collective leverage against the Turks providing bases from which U.S. aircraft can bomb Islamic State positions in Syria and/or Iraq, or, if it was conceivable (which it isn't) bases from which the U.S. could re-invade Iraq or invade Syria. Now, 102 days later, ISIS releases all forty-nine of their Turkish hostages, leading to the straightforward, logical question: Why did they do so?
Perhaps the Turkish government paid the Islamic State a substantial ransom. Problem is, the Turks vehemently deny doing so. So what persuaded ISIS to let them go? The Turkish government also says that the hostage release was secured through the efforts of its intelligence agency, not any direct special forces action or diplomatic negotiation. What were the details of that? The Turks aren't saying, other than that they were "intense efforts". So, again, if they were liberated by force, what persuaded ISIS to turn the Turkish hostages loose?
Was it threats? Hard to believe there's any threat that could intimidate a jihadist band that embraces death as a sacred honor and duty. So if it wasn't threats and it wasn't coercion and it wasn't force and it wasn't a payoff, what's left? Well, the Latin term for it would be quid pro quo. The Turks must have offered ISIS something they wanted in exchange for the hostages. Was it a promise to not oppose ISIS or aid in attacks against them in exchange for Turkish territory being left alone - in essence, a non-aggression pact similar to the one ISIS inked this week with the so-called "Free Syrian Army"? Now we're probably getting warm.
But let's take it one step further still. Harken back to the lede above: Turkey is run by a self-proclaimed Islamist regime. Ahmet Davutoglu, sworn in as Prime Minister just three weeks ago, was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Foreign Minister, and succeeded him in the premiership only because Erdoğan elevated himself to the Turkish presidency. Consequently Davutoglu is most likely a figurehead and Erdoğan's lapdog. This hostage release puts a big feather in his hat at the same time. Meanwhile Erdoğan, who harbors dreams of reviving the old Ottoman Empire and is hostile to the West, has no reason to cooperate with the Obama Regime's faux efforts to "curb" ISIS and every reason to make clandestine common cause with the group. Perhaps Erdoğan made a deal with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that they will jointly run the Global Caliphate from Ankara. That would be a helluva better deal than he could ever get from Turkey's years-long, frustrated, and ultimately unrequited efforts to join the European Union, a jilting that alienated the Turks and pushed them in the direction of electing an Islamist like Erdoğan in the first place.
....and again after the Ankara bombing that massacred over a hundred Kurds that the Turks blamed conveniently on ISIS:
It's like the Bowe Bergdahl debacle - it just doesn't smell right. ISIS capturing forty-nine Turkish "infidels" and not beheading them as fast as their scimitars could slice & dice? And if you argue that ISIS recognized them as fellow Sunni Muslims, then why did they take them hostage in the first place? And now there's a huge bombing in Ankara that just happens to target a protest from the minority group the Turkish government wants to wipe out, and with which ISIS is already at war, and that Turkish government conveniently fingers the same jihadist group that helpfully and obediently released forty-nine Turkish hostages without incident and with not a single hair harmed on any of their heads. Sorry, but I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday....
I think Ankara and Mosul have a clandestine alliance of convenience, and in this instance the Islamic State is providing plausible cover for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's explosive ploy to stir up up nationalist, anti-Kurdish sentiment.
In light of the above, is it implausible to believe that Turkey is importing oil from the Islamic State and otherwise using them as their proxy army against Bashar al-Assad - and, by association, the Russians? Especially when our own drone surveillance has proven it and the Obama Regime is downplaying it instead of denying it?
Does not, in other words, Putin have a valid grievance? Which, in the context of Turkey, and therefore NATO, and therefore the United States, already being in a technical state of war with Russia, is excruciatingly toe-curling? And does it really matter how much oil is flowing from ISIS to Turkey, as opposed to the flow existing at all?
Sounds to me like Putin is building his case for war against us, and that the Obama Regime is whistling past the proverbial necropolis.
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