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"First and foremost, the Turks help the militants sell stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil for $20 a barrel, which is half the market price."

Commercial-scale oil smuggling from Islamic State controlled territory into Turkey must be stopped, Putin said after meeting Hollande in Moscow.



"Vehicles, carrying oil, lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon," said Putin, reminding the press that the scale of the issue was discussed at the G20 summit in Antalya earlier this month, where the Russian leader demonstrated reconnaissance footage taken by Russian pilots.



The views resemble a "living oil pipe" stretched from ISIS and rebel controlled areas of Syria into Turkey, the Russian President stressed. "Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there - empty."



"We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas [that oil comes from], and not with any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going," Putin said.

Appearing on PBS's "Charlie Rose" on Tuesday, Rose pointed out that before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the U.S. had not bombed ISIS-controlled oil tankers.



Morell explained, "Prior to Paris, there seemed to be a judgment that ... look, we don't want to destroy these oil tankers because that's infrastructure that's going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn't there anymore, and it's going to create environmental damage. And we didn't go after oil wells — actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls because we didn't want to do environmental damage and we didn't want to destroy that infrastructure, right."

What kind of "war on terror" are we running?

In the last two days, Putin has been found saying one thing and doing another: Although he declared that Russia would not go to war with Turkey for "stabbing it in the back", debkafile's military and intelligence sources report that since Wednesday night, Nov. 25, Russian heavy bombers and warplanes have been hitting every Turkish vehicle moving or stationary inside Syria.



They bombed the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, located on the Turkey-Syria frontier, as well trailers and tractors parked in an area belonging to the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, on the Syrian side of the border.

In addition to punishing the Turkish leader, Russia's massive military operations in Syria aim to degrade the rebel groups fighting the Assad regime. Heavy bombing sorties this week on the Syrian-Turkish border are cutting off tens of thousands of rebels from their only source of fresh supplies of weapons, ammo, food and fighters, leaving them without a line of retreat and nowhere to send their wounded.

Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell has publicly admitted that we have purposely avoided damaging the main source of income for ISIS, and his explanation for why we were doing this is utterly bizarre. But at this point what could the Obama administration say that would actually make sense? Everyone now knows that ISIS has been making hundreds of millions of dollars selling oil in Turkey, and that this has been done with the full knowledge and complicity of the Obama White House . This is potentially the biggest scandal of the entire Obama presidency, and yet so far the Republicans have not jumped on it.If you or I even gave five bucks to ISIS, we would be arrested and hauled off to Guantanamo Bay. And yet Barack Obama is allowing ISIS to funnel massive quantities of oil through our NATO ally Turkey, and he is not doing anything to stop this from happening. It is a betrayal of the American people that is so vast that it is hard to put into words.By now, virtually everyone on the entire planet knows exactly what is going on. For example, Iraq's former National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie shared the following on his Facebook page on Saturday ...Until Russia started bombing the living daylights out of them, an endless parade of trucks carrying ISIS oil would go back and forth over the Turkish border completely unmolested. Following the downing of a Russian SU-24 bomber by Turkey in an area where many of these trucks travel, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to publicly air this dirty laundry. Just check out what he told reporters following a meeting with French President Francois Hollande last week ...If the Russians could see all of this, the U.S. military could see it too. In fact, we have far better surveillance capabilities than the Russians do.So why didn't Obama put an end to this?Well, as I mentioned above, former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell told PBS that the Obama administration didn't want "to create environmental damage", and he insists that the oil wells are "infrastructure that's going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn't there anymore". The following comes from the Daily Caller ...In case you think that this is some sort of a joke, you can watch video of Morell making these comments on PBS below ...Meanwhile, things between Russia and Turkey continue to get even more tense. The Russians have slapped severe economic sanctions on the Turks, they have shut down all channels of communication with Turkey's military, and they are bombing every Turkish vehicle that they can find inside Syria. The following comes from a report that was put out by Debka ...As I wrote about the other day , it has been documented that our NATO ally Turkey has been "training ISIS militants, funneling weapons to them, buying their oil, and tending to their wounded in Turkish hospitals". Now, heavy bombing by the Russians threatens to cut off those links ...At this point, Russia and Turkey are very close to a state of war.But as a member of NATO, the United States is obligated to help protect Turkey if a full-blown shooting war does break out.We are closer to World War III than we have been in decades, and yet most Americans are still completely and totally oblivious to what is taking place.Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, because things over in the Middle East threaten to spiral completely and totally out of control.