Russia's 2015 Claims on ISIS Oil and Turkey: What Was Shown

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Tu-22 MZ strategic bombers of Russia's Aerospace Defense Forces set to hit ISIS targets in Syria © Ministry of defence of the Russian Federation / Sputnik - Russian military reveals details of ISIS-Turkey oil smuggling - ISIS oil business involves Erdogan & his family
Russian Tu-22M3 long-range bombers prepared for strikes in Syria, 2015. Photo: Russian Ministry of Defence / Sputnik.

On 2 December 2015, Russia's defence ministry held a televised briefing in Moscow accusing Turkey of being the main buyer of oil smuggled out of Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State group (ISIS), and claiming that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his family were personally involved. Russia showed satellite images and drone footage of tanker trucks, but by its own admission it presented only part of its evidence and offered no proof linking Erdoğan's family to the trade. Turkey rejected the claims as slander, and the United States publicly sided with Ankara. What follows sets out what was claimed, what independent reporting had already found about ISIS oil, and what remained unproven.

What Russia claimed at the briefing

Three senior officers led the presentation: Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov, Sergei Rudskoy of the General Staff's operations directorate, and Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defence Control Centre. Their main points were these:

  • Turkey as chief customer. Antonov said Turkey was the main destination for oil taken from captured fields in Syria and Iraq, and accused the country's top leadership, including Erdoğan's family, of direct involvement.
  • Three smuggling routes. A western route to the Mediterranean ports of Dörtyol and İskenderun, a northern route to the refinery at Batman, and an eastern route from Iraq to a hub at Cizre.
  • Scale. Russia estimated that some 8,500 tanker trucks were moving up to 200,000 barrels, and claimed its airstrikes on wells, refineries and convoys had already halved the group's oil income. These figures came from Russia alone and were not independently confirmed.
  • Weapons and fighters. Officials alleged that about 2,000 fighters, 250 vehicles and over 120 tonnes of ammunition had recently crossed from Turkey into Syria, and promised further evidence on training and arms the following week.

Russia also said it did not expect Erdoğan to resign, describing that as a matter for Turkish voters. Images and footage were posted on the ministry's website.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

LIVE: Russian MoD showcases footage of vehicles moving through Syrian-Turkish border https://t.co/r2d4Mvwlx7 pic.twitter.com/SZNVhRMVTi

— RT (@RT_com) Δεκέμβριος 2, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

#ISIS oil business involves #Erdogan & his family – MoD LIVE https://t.co/fsa1WooIVi pic.twitter.com/7n0GuT0e1u

— RT (@RT_com) Δεκέμβριος 2, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

The same afternoon, Russia's senior Muslim cleric, Mufti Ravil Gainutdin, urged calm. He said diplomacy could still settle the dispute.

The background: a jet shot down nine days earlier

The briefing cannot be understood without the event that preceded it. On 24 November 2015 a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Su-24M bomber near the Syria–Turkey border. Turkey said the jet had crossed into its airspace for about 17 seconds after repeated warnings; Russia insisted it never left Syria. The pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Peshkov, was killed by ground fire as he parachuted down, and a Russian marine died in the rescue operation that recovered the navigator.

Vladimir Putin called the shootdown a stab in the back by accomplices of terrorists. Within days Moscow cut military contacts, deployed S-400 air-defence systems to Syria, banned charter flights to Turkey, restricted Turkish imports and moved to end visa-free travel. The oil accusations came in the middle of this escalation, which is one reason many observers treated them with caution. Relations only thawed in June 2016, when Erdoğan sent Putin a letter expressing his condolences to the pilot's family.

What earlier reporting said about ISIS oil and Turkey

The Russian claims did not come from nowhere. Throughout 2014 and 2015, journalists, researchers and officials had described oil from ISIS-held fields leaking across the long and porous Turkish border, though they generally pointed to smugglers, middlemen and lax enforcement rather than to the Turkish leadership.

  • The Abu Sayyaf raid. In mid-May 2015 US special forces killed Abu Sayyaf, a Tunisian ISIS commander who oversaw the group's oil and gas business, in eastern Syria, and seized several terabytes of data. The Guardian reported in July 2015 that a Western official who had seen the material described dealings between Turkish officials and ISIS figures as undeniable; that assessment was never published in full.
  • A Turkish opposition MP. In 2014 Ali Ediboğlu of the opposition CHP claimed that around $800 million of ISIS oil had entered Turkey through makeshift pipelines in border areas, according to Al-Monitor.
  • An Iraqi former security adviser. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a former Iraqi national security adviser, told RT that oil was trucked into Turkey and sold at under half the world price, and said there was "no shadow of a doubt" Turkish authorities knew. He also alleged that wounded militants were treated in Turkish hospitals. These were his assertions, not findings of an inquiry.
  • A statistical study. Two University of Greenwich researchers, George Kiourktsoglou and Alec Coutroubis, reported that tanker exports from the Ceyhan terminal on Turkey's Mediterranean coast tended to rise when ISIS fought near oil assets. It was a correlation, which the authors offered as a possible sign of smuggling rather than proof.
  • Smugglers' own accounts. BuzzFeed News interviewed businessmen who described smuggling Syrian oil into Turkey and said border guards often looked the other way.
ISIS oil business involves Erdogan & his family - Turkish tankers trying to take ISIS oil out of the province of Salahuddin

Iraqi officials in Diyala province told the Kurdish Daily News in March 2015 that they had stopped several Turkish-registered tankers trying to move ISIS oil out of Salahuddin province. The claim was reported locally and not independently confirmed.

Aerial photographs taken by Russia allegedly show giant convoys of trucks going from ISIS-controlled oil territory in Syria to Turkey - Russian military reveals details of ISIS-Turkey oil smuggling - ISIS oil business involves Erdogan & his family

Russia's aerial images of long lines of trucks heading for the border became the centrepiece of its case. They show traffic, but not on their own who owned the oil or who bought it. Retired US general Wesley Clark, NATO's former supreme commander in Europe, said in a television interview in late November 2015 that ISIS oil was probably passing through Turkey.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

‘Commercial scale’ oil smuggling into Turkey becomes priority target of anti- #ISIS strikes https://t.co/5PGSeyqAft pic.twitter.com/uQuBLK4eS0

— RT (@RT_com) Νοέμβριος 27, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

Putin had made a similar point days before the briefing, describing columns of tankers stretching to the horizon as a "living oil pipe" running from militant-held territory into Turkey. He said Turkish ignorance of it was hard to believe.

Turkey's answer and the Western reaction

Erdoğan, speaking in Doha on the day of the briefing, said nobody had the right to slander Turkey, repeated that he would step down if the accusations were proven, and stressed that he did not want relations with Russia to deteriorate further. His son Bilal, then studying in Bologna, told Corriere della Sera on 8 December that he had nothing to do with oil transport, called ISIS an enemy of Turkey, and argued that a NATO member could not secretly aid the group without its allies knowing.

Washington backed Ankara. A US State Department spokesman, asked about the allegation that Erdoğan's family profited from the trade, replied: "We just don't believe that to be true in any way, shape or form." US officials did acknowledge that ISIS oil reached Turkey through middlemen, and pressed Turkey to tighten border controls, but said they saw no evidence of state involvement. No court or independent investigation has since established that Erdoğan or his relatives profited from ISIS oil.

Journalists jailed over a weapons story

Turkish weapons ‘heading to end in ISIS hands’ - RT speaks to Cumhuriyet journalists - Police use tear-inducing agent against demonstrators during a protest over the arrest of journalists Can Dundar and Erdem Gul in Ankara, Turkey
Police use tear gas on protesters in Ankara after the arrest of Cumhuriyet journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, 27 November 2015. Photo: Umit Bektas.

A week before the briefing, Turkish authorities arrested Can Dündar, editor-in-chief of the opposition daily Cumhuriyet, and its Ankara bureau chief Erdem Gül. In May 2015 the paper had published images of weapons it said were being sent into Syria on trucks belonging to Turkey's national intelligence agency, MİT, intercepted by gendarmes in January 2014. The government at various points described the cargo as aid for Syrian Turkmen and denied that the trucks carried arms to extremists.

The two journalists were charged with espionage, revealing state secrets and aiding a terrorist organisation. Speaking to an RT crew at their Istanbul office, Cumhuriyet staff said the weapons risked ending up with jihadist groups and argued that labels separating ISIS from other armed factions were often meaningless on the ground. Around the same time, Hürriyet columnist Ertuğrul Özkök was reportedly indicted for "insulting" the president in a column.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

Turkish police pepper spray supporters of 2 prominent journalists arrested for ‘treason’ https://t.co/8U23VOtDjJ pic.twitter.com/FlknGG70OT

— RT (@RT_com) Νοέμβριος 27, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

Dündar and Gül spent 92 days in prison before Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled their detention a violation of their rights in February 2016. In May 2016 Dündar was sentenced to five years and ten months for leaking state secrets; he moved to Germany soon after, and in December 2020 a Turkish court sentenced him in absentia to 27 and a half years.

Greece and Cyprus: Tsipras's tweets and Lavrov in Nicosia

Greek Prime Minister Blasts Turkey on Twitter Over Russian Plane Downing - Turkey violated Greek airspace 2,244 times in 2014 alone

Greece watched the Russia–Turkey crisis closely. Turkish military aircraft entered Greek-claimed airspace thousands of times a year, and Greek pilots routinely intercepted them. On 29 November 2015, during an EU–Turkey summit on migration in Brussels, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras posted four tweets addressed to his Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoğlu. In them he remarked that Greek pilots were luckily not as jumpy with Russian jets as Turkey's, called the situation in the Aegean absurd, noted that both countries spend billions on arms, one side to violate airspace and the other to intercept, and lamented that with all that hardware neither could stop the smugglers whose boats were drowning refugees.

Greek Prime Minister Blasts Turkey on Twitter Over Russian Plane Downing - Turkey violated Greek airspace 2,244 times in 2014 alone - Tsipras tweet to Davutoglu

The English versions were removed from his English-language account soon afterwards, but screenshots spread widely and the Greek originals stayed online.




Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov referred to the great self-restraint that Greeks pilots show towards the violation of Greek airspace by Turkish jets.

On the day of the Moscow briefing, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was in Nicosia for talks with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades. He publicly endorsed Tsipras's remark that Greek pilots show great restraint in the face of Turkish violations. The talks covered the Cyprus issue, energy and trade. Cyprus has been divided since Turkey's 1974 invasion, and Turkish troops still occupy the northern third of the island. According to Cypriot government sources, Lavrov favoured ending the system of foreign "guarantor powers" over the island, and thanked Nicosia for its stance after the downing of the Russian jet.

What can be said with confidence

ISIS earned large sums from oil in 2014 and 2015; much of it was sold locally and some was smuggled across the Turkish border with the help of traders and, at times, negligent or complicit officials. Turkey's border controls were widely criticised as weak during that period. Turkish journalists who reported on arms shipments into Syria were prosecuted.

Other claims remain unproven. Russia never produced evidence that Erdoğan or his family profited from ISIS oil, and its figures came from a government in open conflict with Ankara, presented largely through its state broadcaster RT. Western governments, while pressing Turkey to do more, rejected the family allegation. A fair reading is that the trade was real, its political protection at the highest level was alleged but never demonstrated, and the timing of the accusations was shaped by the shootdown crisis.

Sources: Original live coverage and interviews by RT (briefing, Cumhuriyet, al-Rubaie), compiled with material from Zero Hedge, Pappas Post and Proto Thema; OCCRP: Russia reveals "proof" Turkey's Erdogan smuggled IS oil; Anadolu Agency: Turkish president's son dismisses Russia oil trade claims; Wikipedia: 2015 Russian Sukhoi Su-24 shootdown; Wikipedia: Can Dündar; Wikipedia: Abu Sayyaf (ISIL).

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