It all started with a Pentagon tweet showing a before and after picture of a "modular oil refinery" used by ISIS:

.@PentagonPresSec re #Syria: Before & after photos of #Jeribe modular oil refinery — targets of coalition attacks. pic.twitter.com/pfpSJhxPwa — U.S. Dept of Defense (@DeptofDefense) September 25, 2014

By "modular" the Department of Defense meant "mobile." CNN had more:

U.S. and coalition warplanes pounded ISIS positions in eastern Syria on Wednesday, targeting what a Pentagon official described as mobile oil refineries being used by the so-called Islamic State terror group to help finance its operations. The latest round of airstrikes were aimed at cutting off money flowing to ISIS, which makes up to $2 million a day from oil produced by the mobile refineries, Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, told CNN.

So the US is targeting ISIS' mobile refineries as a way of "halting" the organization's funding? Great. But where does ISIS buy these refineries: after all while the US provided all the weapons, arms and munitions ISIS has and is using against, well, the US, one assumes not even America was deploying mobile refineries in Iraq and Syria: after all Haliburton and Bechtel get paid much more when they make the "fixed", CapEx-soaking versions.

Well, one place is, drumroll, everyone's favorite biggest IPO of all time. That's right, Alibaba:

Wait, is the US implicitly subsidizing Alibaba which is collecting massive commissions on sales of illegal arms to a terrorist group, which has to order even more such mobile refineries as the US blows them up one after another?

Stranger things have happened.

And, the punchline, is that the supplier is none other than a Turkish Company named NCER:

Turkey, of course, is the one (NATO) country that has so far refused to join the US grand "alliance" against the Islamic State, has refused to grant the US use of its airspace for counter-Islamic State strikes, and whose 49 hostages were released by ISIS a week ago in gratitude for Turkey's unwillingness to fold to the US.

So are all of these events related?

We don't know. One place to look for answers is Mr. Karem Ekrem Merter, the contact for NCER, who was kind enough to put up the following YouTube clip of a mobile refinery on YouTube in November 2012...

And has conveniently listed his contact info as follows:

contact: + 90 542 440 07 03

web: www.mobile-refinery.com

email: sales@mobile-refinery.com

As for whether Alibaba is the euphoria, just-IPOed "marketplace" used to illegally provide Islamic State terrorists with the tools they need to generate millions in profits each day, we are confident the regulators will answer that question shortly.

h/t Barry