Tens of thousands of documents containing the names, addresses, phone
numbers and family contacts of extremists who joined ISIS have been
given to Sky News, the broadcaster said Wednesday.
Sky
reported that a disillusioned former member had handed over the
documents on a memory stick that had been stolen from the head of the
group’s internal security police.
The
documents are forms that ISIS recruits had to fill out in order to be
accepted into the organization, and contain information on nationals
from 51 countries, the broadcaster reported.
“Sky
News has informed the authorities about the haul,” the news channel
wrote on its website. No comment was immediately available from
Britain’s interior or foreign ministries.
Some
of the documents reportedly contain the information of previously
unknown militants located across northern Europe, the United States and
Canada, as well as in North Africa and the Middle East, it said.
Richard
Barrett, former global terrorism operations director at MI6, wrote on
Twitter that the records would shed an “invaluable light” on who had
joined ISIS.
“This is going to be an invaluable resource for analysts,” he added.
Copies
of the documents broadcast by Sky News showed that recruits would have
to answer 23 questions including on their blood type, mother’s maiden
name, “level of sharia understanding” and previous experience.
Some
of the names in the documents are of fighters who have been already
identified, such as Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a former rapper from west
London who once posted an image of himself on Twitter holding a severed
head.
Another named is Junaid Hussain, a
cyber-operative for ISIS from the British city of Birmingham who was
killed in a drone strike last August, and 21-year-old Reyaad Khan who
appeared in a recruitment video and was killed last year.
The documents were obtained from a man who uses the name Abu Hamed, a former Free Syrian Army member who joined ISIS.
He
stole the memory stick of documents and handed them over in Turkey to a
journalist, explaining that he left because Islamic rules had collapsed
inside the group.
Hamed claimed the group had given up on its headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa and was moving into the desert.