An implicit second-order finite difference scheme, which is unconditionally stable, is employed to discretize fractional advection–diffusion equations with constant coefficients. The resulting systems are full, unsymmetric, and possess Toeplitz structure. Circulant and skew-circulant splitting iteration is employed for solving the Toeplitz system. The method is proved to be convergent unconditionally to the solution of the linear system. Numerical examples show that the convergence rate of the method is fast. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.