Documents listing the names of Islamic State fighters have been touted around the Middle East for months, dangled in front of media outlets for large sums of money.
One such approach was made several weeks ago to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. The newspaper was offered a data set with the names of “tens of thousands” of fighters. It declined, saying that there was absolutely no way it would pay for such documents.
Instead, it dispatched its own reporters to the region, close to Isis-held territory, in particular the frontline near Iraqi Kurdistan. They hired a local to help with translation and contacts and to trace documents.
They found a wide array of documents and videos available from inside Isis and offered for sale for large sums. Some had been captured by Kurdish forces, others had come from Isis. The paper said the local hire obtained their set of documents and was paid no more than a usual allowance fee. They formed the basis of the paper’s story on Monday.
Sky News followed two days later, saying it had tens of thousands of documents with details of Isis fighters, written by its chief correspondent and veteran foreign reporter, Stuart Ramsay.
Ramsay said he met the source of the documents in Turkey, an individual calling himself Abu Hamed who had been in the Free Syrian Army rebel group and switched to Isis before becoming disillusioned with it.
Sky said the documents were on a memory stick stolen from the head of Isis’s internal security police.
The Syrian opposition news website, Zaman al-Wasl, in a report billed as “exclusive” and published before Sky’s, said it had the personal data on 1,736 fighters and that its documents had come from Isis’s general administration of borders.
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