Documents obtained by German intelligence revealing the recruitment details of jihadist fighters of the Islamic State provides a revelatory insight into the functioning and organisational structure of the secretive terror organisation.
Confirmation of the existence of the documents was revealed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung paper and two German broadcasters on Monday evening. Sky News also claimed that it too had copies of the cache of documents containing the names of 22,000 jihadists, leaked by a former Free Syrian Army convert to IS who then quit the organisation. He claims to have stolen the top-secret information on a memory stick from the head of ISIS’s head of internal security police.
Zaman al-Wasl, a pro-opposition Syrian news website, published examples of the questionnaires on Tuesday. It said that 1,736 fighters from 40 countries had been revealed – a quarter were Saudis and the rest predominantly Tunisian, Moroccan and Egyptian.
Germany’s Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière, who confirmed the authenticity of the documents said they would facilitate “speedier, clearer investigations and stricter prison sentences” for those returning from Syria and Iraq, the Guardian reported on Thursday. The materials would help to clarify “the underlying structures of this terrorist organisation” the paper reported.
The leak will be a major setback for the organisation, which is believed by western intelligence agencies to be facing military setbacks on the ground in Iraq and Syria, a dwindling stream of recruits, and demoralization in the ranks.
The documents contain ISIS recruitment forms, each containing 23 heads of information that new recruits have to fill. These include vital data like names, birth dates, addresses, nationalities, home towns, countries visited before reaching the ‘Caliphate’, education levels, and even the recruit’s understanding of Sharia.
The caliphate has recruited jihadists from more than 50 countries. Most of them are Arabs, while the majority of European recruits are from France, Germany and Britain, the documents reveal.
More than a dozen Britons figure on the list, including the three well known British jihadists – Reyaad Khan from Cardiff, who was killed in the UK’s first drone strike in Syria; Junaid Hussein who was killed in a U.S. airstrike on Raqqa, and Abdel Majid Abdel Bary who is believed to have had links to Mohammed Emwazi, the beheader also known as Jihadi John.
The documents are from late 2013, but nevertheless have the potential to severely weaken the organisation as jihadist networks can now be uncovered from what is believed to be the first jihadist database to come into the public domain.
