When a three star Russian general strolled into the US Embassy in Baghdad on September 30 of last year, US personnel were taken aback by what he said: “If you have forces in the area we request they leave. Airstrikes start in one hour.”
That was the beginning of Russia’s intervention in Syria and it took the US completely off guard. It was vintage Putin and even the Russian President’s detractors couldn’t help but chuckle. Over the next 30 days, a relentless air campaign carried out by Moscow’s warplanes rolled back anti-Assad elements in Latakia while the IRGC and Hezbollah moved into position for an assault on Aleppo.
Then, on November 24, disaster struck. Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 near the Syrian border. One of the pilots was killed.
In the hours after the plane crashed, the world held its breath. Putin, the West figured, would respond with force. Fears only grew when the FSA’s First Coastal Division published a video on YouTube that appeared to show a fighter using a US-made TOW to destroy a Russian search and rescue helicopter.
And then, just when the it appeared that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was set to plunge NATO into a world war with the Russians and the Iranians, Putin did something no one expected. Instead of sending the long range bombers to Ankara, he addressed reporters while sitting next to Jordan’s King Abdullah and flatly said the following: "ISIS gets money by selling oil to Turkey."
Over the next two weeks, The Kremlin launched a relentless PR campaign complete with satellite images and detailed slide decks showing what the Russians claimed was unequivocal evidence of Erdogan’s complicity in the illicit (and highly lucrative) ISIS oil trade.
Sergei Lavrov and Maria Zakharova heaped on the pressure and before long, the entire international community began to look with skepticism upon Ankara’s contention that Turkey is as an eager and sincere partner in the “war” on ISIS.
By that time, we had of course documented the Turkey connection exhaustively in the following four-part series:
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