Amid rubble, a trove of ISIS intelligence
WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence analysts have gained valuable insights into Islamic State’s planning and personnel from a vast cache of digital data and other material recovered from bombed-out offices, abandoned laptops and the cellphones of dead fighters in recently liberated areas of Iraq and Syria.
In the most dramatic gain, U.S. officials over the last two months have added thousands of names of known or suspected Islamic State operatives to an international watch list used at airports and other border crossings. The Interpol database now contains about 19,000 names.
The intelligence haul, the largest since U.S. forces entered the war in mid-2014, threatens to overwhelm already stretched counter-terrorism and law enforcement agencies in Europe, where Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has claimed responsibility for attacks in Paris, London and Stockholm this year.
In recent weeks, U.S.backed ground forces have sent an estimated 30 terabytes of data — equal to nearly two years of nonstop video footage — to the National Media Exploitation Center in Bethesda, Md., a little-known arm of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Analysts there are scrutinizing handwritten ledgers, computer spreadsheets, thumb drives, mobile phone memory cards and other materials for clues to terrorist cells or plots.
“The reason electronic exploitation is so critical is that enemy forces don’t fake those records,” an intelligence official said. “When you interrogate someone they can hide facts, but logs of phone calls and video clips don’t lie. That stuff isn’t made-up.”
The material came from Mosul, the militants’ selfdeclared capital in Iraq, which was recaptured July 9 after an eight-month battle. Other intelligence was found in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, which was retaken on Aug. 31, and from Raqqa, the group’s self-declared capital in Syria, where fighting is still underway.
“We’ve gotten significant amounts of intelligence as a result of the fall of these places — much is still being analyzed,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told The Times during a visit to Amman, Jordan, last month. “It has helped us to identify at least some of their aspirations.”
U.S. officials said they have gleaned planning ideas and outlines of potential operations rather than ongoing terrorist plots. But they also have gathered details into the group’s leadership and the hierarchy of fighters under command.
The biggest windfall came from what officials said were meticulous Islamic State records about the foreign fighters who arrived since convoys of black-flagged militants first stormed out of northern Syria and into Iraq in 2014.
The records include names, aliases, home countries and other personal information.
The data has been shared with a 19-nation task force in Jordan, code-named Operation Gallant Phoenix, that tries to track foreign fighters in an effort to disrupt terrorist cells and networks. The task force is led by the U.S. military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command.
“If we find information about foreign fighters from a certain country, we go through proper procedures to make sure it’s shared,” said Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the global coalition to defeat Islamic State. President Barack Obama appointed McGurk in 2015, and President Donald Trump has kept him on.
“So it is a very comprehensive campaign, militarily, on the ground, taking territory back; collecting information; processing it; and then building the database and the system so it can be shared and acted upon,” McGurk said in Amman.
With few U.S. troops on the ground, most of the intelligence is gathered by Iraqi security forces and U.S.backed Syrian militias who have been trained to gather material to be analyzed back in the states.
A phone from the pocket of a dead fighter often includes phone numbers that can assist counter-terrorism investigations far afield. Indeed, intelligence recovered from the battlefield since 2015 has led to arrests or broken up plots in at least 15 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and Canada, officials said.
Matthew Levitt, a former counter-terrorism official at the FBI and Treasury Department now with the nonpartisan Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said obtaining an alias, driver’s license, passport number or biometric data can be crucial to blocking a terrorist plot.
“Time and again, we’ve found that even the smallest bit of information can prove critical,” he said. “It could help us discover a person we never knew about or provide new leads on an underground cell.”