MOSCOW, September 24 (RIA Novosti) - The European External Action Service (EEAS) has no proof that EU member states purchased crude pumped from Islamic State-controlled oil wells, the head of EEAS's Division of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran John O'Rourke said Wednesday.
Speaking at the European Parliament hearing, John O'Rourke said questions had been raised about the alleged purchases of Islamic State's oil by European Union member states, adding the European External Action Service could not confirm these reports.
O'Rourke confirmed that Iraq's breakaway region of Kurdistan had exported an unspecified amount of crude via Turkey and dispatched several tankers to the Mediterranean and beyond in search of ports that would agree to accept the deliveries.
O'Rourke said some of those tankers were able to reach their destinations and sell the cargo, one of the countries being Israel. The EU official said he did not know where the rest of the oil had gone.
John O'Rourke described these sales as running counter to international laws, since Kurdish crude was sold without the permit of the Iraqi government. But this did not mean there was any Islamic State oil on those tankers, since the origin of the crude was very hard to track.
Over the past three months, the Islamic State (IS) rose from a fledgling Islamist movement to a dominant insurgency in the Middle East controlling Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul and a swath of territories west of it, as well as lands in Syria.
The seizure of Mosul, the site of Iraq's largest oil refinery, has made IS one of the world's richest terror organizations. It has been reported smuggling crude from some 80 oil wells near Mosul and selling it to murky buyers.
