Russia's top brass claims satellite images prove Turkey's oil trade with ISIS

Turkey may have fired the first shot on a Russian military plane last week, but Russia has made it clear it's prepared to use everything in its arsenal against its new enemy No. 1.

Top Russian officials launched a rocket of rhetoric against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family on Wednesday, claiming to show proof that Turkey is directly financing an illicit oil trade with the Islamic State. 

         

Inside a large war room at Moscow's National Defense Control Center, officials showed foreign journalists a slide presentation with satellite images from August they claimed show thousands of trucks carrying oil from areas under the control of ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq into Turkey.

.@mod_russia showing lots of sat pics. We know from Russia's sat intel work in Ukraine these are dubious at best. pic.twitter.com/ZT83Z02YWd

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) December 2, 2015

"Turkey is the main destination for the oil stolen from its legitimate owners, which are Syria and Iraq. Turkey resells this oil," said Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov. "The appalling part about it is that the country's top political leadership is involved in the illegal business — President Erdogan and his family."

Antonov did not, however, provide evidence to support their claims of Erdogan and his family's direct involvement in the illegal enterprise or allow foreign media to ask questions.

The allegations follow Turkey's downing of a Russian Su-24 warplane near the Syrian border last week, which sparked anger between two countries that had worked hard in recent years to develop close relations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the downing a "stab in the back carried out by accomplices of terrorists" and levied an array of sanctions against Turkey in the wake of the incident. He first accused Erdogan of backing ISIS on Monday; Erdogan denied these claims, saying he was prepared to resign if Russia could provide proof, asking that Putin do the same if he couldn't provide proof.

Antonov claimed that ISIS militants make $2 billion a year from the illegal oil trade. His colleague, Lt.-Gen. Sergei Rudskoy of the Russian military's general saff, said Russian airstrikes on ISIS oil infrastructure in Syria has cut the militants' profits in half.

"Over the past two months, Russian airstrikes have inflicted damage on 32 oil production facilities, 11 refineries and 23 oil pumping stations. A total of 1,080 tanker trucks carrying oil and petroleum products have been destroyed," Rudskoy said, without specifying whether they belonged to ISIS.

Rudskoy added that Russia had identified three main oil transportation routes from ISIS-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq into Turkey.