FRANCE’S foreign minister accused Syria’s government of trading with Islamic State yesterday, after Paris and Moscow agreed to fight the terror group’s oil smuggling.

Laurent Fabius told French radio that his government “believed” Syria was buying oil from the Isis rebels it is fighting, without elaborating or providing any evidence.

He ruled out French troops on the ground in Syria, suggesting that the so-called Free Syrian Army and “Sunni Arab states” could fight Isis alongside the Syrian armed forces.

Mr Fabius was parroting claims by US Treasury Department counter-terror chief Adam Szubin on Wednesday.

Mr Szubin alleged that Syrian businessman George Haswani and his company Hesco Engineering and Construction was the middleman for the trade.

But Mr Haswani had already dismissed previous allegations of that nature as “fantasies.”

French President Francois Hollande met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday to discuss co-operation in the fight against Isis, which was behind the Paris terrorist attacks that killed 130 people.

The two leaders agreed that cutting off Isis oil smuggling to Turkey was a priority.

Bilal Erdogan, the son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stands accused of profiting from the illicit and immoral trade.

“Day and night they are going to Turkey,” Mr Putin said. “Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there — empty.”

Taking a sarcastic tone, he continued: “We assume that the top political leadership of Turkey might not know anything about this. Hard to believe, but it is theoretically possible.”

The same day Russia bombed another convoy of Turkish lorries at the Bab al-Salameh border crossing north of Aleppo, which is controlled by the Qatari-backed Ahrar al-Sham extremist group.

Turkey arrested Cumhuriyet newspaper editor Can Dundar and his Ankara correspondent Erdem Gul on Thursday for exposing secret government arms shipments to Syrian insurgents in May.

• Italian customs officials seized more than 800 guns being transported from Turkey to Belgium without a licence yesterday.

Authorities in the port of Trieste found the 847 Turkish-made Winchester pump-action shotguns in a Dutch-registered lorry driven by a Turkish citizen.