Turkey cracks down on oil smuggling

Sevda, a 22-year-old waitress, earned 20 times her current pay running smuggled diesel from a village on Turkey's wild and dangerous border with Syria - until her arrest a few months ago.

The smuggled fuel came from oil wells in Iraq or Syria controlled by militants, including the Islamic State group, and was sold to middlemen who smuggled it across the Turkish-Syrian border.

Western intelligence officials have alleged that Turkey is turning a blind eye to a flourishing trade that strengthens the IS group, and Secretary of State John Kerry has called on Turkey to do more to stem the trade.

Analysts estimate that the IS gets up to $US3 million ($A3.25 million) a day in revenue from oil fields seized in Iraq and Syria.

Turkish authorities, smugglers and vendors along Turkey's 900km border with Syria paint a remarkably similar picture: Oil smuggling was a booming business until about six months ago, when Turkish authorities ramped up a multi-layered crackdown that has significantly disrupted the illicit trade.

Many of those interviewed, including Sevda, gave only their first name or asked for anonymity out of fear of reprisals by authorities or smugglers, who believe that reports in the Turkish news media led to the crackdown.

Turkish authorities say they have beefed up border controls, arrested dozens of smugglers and have gone after consumers with an extensive stop-and-search operation on Turkish highways where fuel tanks are tested for smuggled oil.

Turkey says it seized nearly 20 million litres of oil at the border in the first eight months of 2014, about four times as much as in the same period in 2013, while illicit fuel discovered on consumers has dropped considerably.

At the peak of Turkey's oil smuggling boom, the main transit point was a dusty hamlet called Hacipasa on the Orontes River that marks the border with Syria. Hacipasa has been a smuggling haven for decades, authorities and residents say. As in other border towns, many families straddle the frontier and trade commodities like sugar and cigarettes back and forth without customs controls.

But Syria's civil war and the capture of oil wells by IS militants opened a giant market that made moguls out of some locals.

"Some people multiplied their wealth a thousand fold in a few months," says a local petrol station owner who declined to be named.

The man, who's spent his life along the border, says he's seen the boom and bust of the smuggling business. As smuggling took off in 2014 and cheap fuel from across the border became readily available, 80 per cent of his legal diesel business disappeared, he said. Since Turkey launched its crackdown, most of it has come back and business is now only 20 per cent off what it used to be.

At many points along the Syrian border, diesel smuggling was small scale, according to smugglers and dealers. But some in Hacipasa figured out how to take it to a higher level, using scores of illicit pipelines under the Orontes. The pipelines were up to three kilometres long and laid up to 15 metres deep, dug using sophisticated imported vehicles with equipment designed to lay fibre-optic cables that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars each, according to authorities and some of those involved. The diesel, crudely refined in Syria, emerged from spigots in cotton fields in Hacipasa and nearby towns, where eager buyers lined up.

Local authorities began digging up those pipelines months ago, cutting off perhaps the biggest source of smuggled oil in the market.

Sevda says that once a week she would co-ordinate oil runs, sitting next to the driver on 10-hour truck trips from Hacipasa with thousands of litres of diesel to a company in the Anatolian city of Denizli, earning $US6,500 ($A7,033) a trip. She could make less money on quick local trips in a Mercedes sedan with a secret extra gas tank.

"Everyone was doing it," she says with a giggle. "It was so much money."

About six months ago, the smuggling was so rampant, Sevda says, that trucks and cars with buyers were often backed up on the windy old road to Hacipasa. The arrest ended her lucrative smuggling career. She says she was released and the company that had been buying diesel from her negotiated down a fine of more than $US60,000 to half that, and paid it.

Turkish authorities, including top officials from the police, border guard and gendarmerie paramilitary police, say the crackdown began in 2013 but took off in the past six months - a period in which Turkey came under increasing pressure from allies, including the US, concerned that IS was funding itself largely from the illicit oil trade.

The extremist group has taken over large sections of Syria and Iraq, and has until recently controlled as many as 11 oil fields in the two countries, analysts say. Within Iraq and Syria, the group sells oil to middlemen at a significant discount. Some of that is smuggled into Turkey, while much is sold locally. Recently, a US-led coalition against IS has targeted refineries in the two countries.

Turkish authorities say the crackdown grew out of concern for internal security and the loss of tax revenues. While they acknowledge that smuggling was once rampant, they dismiss accusations that they have tacitly allowed the extremists a revenue stream out of sympathy for any opponent of the Syrian government.

"If you look at the measures that have been taken in the last two years, and specifically the last year, you will see that Turkey isn't allowing these kinds of activities at all," says Cemalettin Hasimi, an adviser to the Turkish prime ministry, arguing that even the US struggles to effectively patrol its borders.

"If the US had resolved smuggling on the Mexican border then probably Turkey would have done the same thing. ... It's the most difficult thing to do."