Special to WorldTribune.com

The United States is involved in a “cover-up” over Turkey’s alleged smuggling of Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) oil, Russia’s defense ministry said on Dec. 5.

“When U.S. officials say they don’t see how the terrorists’ oil is smuggled to Turkey… it smells badly of a desire to cover up these acts,” the ministry said in a statement on its Facebook page.

ISIL’s sales of captured oil assets on the black market is credited with making it the best-funded terror organization in history.

“The declarations of the Pentagon and the State Department seem like a theater of the absurd,” the statement said, adding that Washington should “watch the videos taken by its (own) drones which have recently been three times as numerous over the Turkey-Syria border and above the oil zones.”

The U.S. State Department said there is no evidence to support Russia’s claim that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family are involved in the illicit oil trade.

“I don’t believe that there is significant smuggling, between ISIL-controlled areas and Turkey of oil in any significance in volume,” Amos Hochstein, the U.S. special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, said on Dec. 4.

U.S. officials told reporters that oil pumped in eastern Syria is refined in ad hoc desert pits equipped with crude stills and sold on the war zone black-market within Syria and Iraq.

ISIL makes an estimated $1.5 million per day from black market oil sales, but the U.S.-led coalition has looked to cut that number with recent air strikes on hundreds of the terror group’s oil tankers.

  Amos Hochstein, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia accuses U.S. of cover-up over ISIL-Turkey oil smuggling, Russian Defense Ministry, WorldTribune.com