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Leaked ISIS Documents ‘Read Like A Bad Comedy’

REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

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Russ Read Pentagon/Foreign Policy Reporter
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Captured documents belonging to the Islamic State show that the jihadis are much better at blowing themselves up than running a functional government.

The documents, obtained by The Daily Beast, show that the so-called caliphate is a bureaucratic nightmare, rife with fundamental problems. The Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss, who obtained and reviewed the papers, said they read “like a bad comedy about embezzlement, infiltration, and bureaucratic infighting.”

The papers leaked from the spokesman for the Ahmad Abdo Brigade, a US-backed anti-ISIS Syrian rebel group. The group’s men found the tranche of documents on the corpse of an ISIS commander named Abu Ali al-Iraqi, who was killed June 8 near the Syrian-Jordanian border.

One letter describes in great detail the discovery of a spy within the ISIS ranks who was able to steal a trove of weapons and equipment from right under the caliphate’s governor for the Damascus region.

According to the letter, an ISIS operation was put together to target the Ahmed Abdo Brigade. A man named Abu Hudhaifa al-Ghoutani was appoined the emir, or leader, of the operation. There was only one problem: Ghoutani was a double agent. He reportedly gathered ISIS military leaders together under the belief that they were to coordinate the operation, while in reality Ghoutani was coordinating with the brigade to assassinate the leaders by placing mines in the area they were meeting.

“But by the grace of Allah,” reads the letter. the operation was not completed. On the same nigh [Ghoutani] escaped to where the sahawat (another name for the brigade) are and stole $6,500, a camera, plastic explosives, circuits, a 8.5 mm pistol, 2 rifles, 1,500 bullets and 7 hand grenades.”

Ghoutani’s theft would sabotage the ISIS mission and forced the fighters to go forward with what little they had left. The mission would end up being a catastrophic failure.

Another letter details the failed bureaucracy within the caliphate. Dr. Abu Sham, a judge’s clerk, writes to Abu al-Abbas al-Jazrawi, the deputy leader of the ISIS Department of Justice, explaining why a jail in Damascus province was overly crowded.

“Well, three-fourths of these prisoners were detained only for a few hours,” wrote Sham, in an attempt to defend himself. “Last month, [nobody] was detained for a period of one week except the last 3 persons mentioned at the end of the list. By the time of writing this letter to you, there is no one in the prison.”

Apparently, the overcrowding problem occurred because someone in the department forgot to provide prisoner release dates.

The documents also included a standard salary table for an ISIS fighter from August 25, 2015. Abu Muslim al-Muhajir, a soldier in ISIS’s Fath Qaryatain Battalion, has his salary listed as $50 per month. Because he is married, he is given another $50 subsidy. While Muhajir appeared to have no other dependents, the document shows ISIS fighters are eligible for additional subsidies for everything from sex slaves to children.

The salary table shows that ISIS fighters were not making as much money as previously thought. As the terrorist group continues to lose ground, its leaders have reportedly cut salaries even deeper. U.S. forces, in coordination with Operation Inherent Resolve, have made a point in recent months to target ISIS’s finances and logistics in an apparent attempt to bleed the caliphate from within.

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