Das internationale Killer-Netzwerk des IS
BREMEN, Germany — Believing he was answering a holy call, Harry Sarfo left his home in the working- class city of Bremen last year and drove for four straight days to reach the territory controlled by the Islamic State in Syria.
He barely had time to settle in before members of the Islamic State’s secret service, wearing masks over their faces, came to inform him and his German friend they no longer wanted Europeans to come to Syria. Where they were needed was back home, to help carry out the group’s plan of waging terrorism across the globe.
“He was speaking openly about the situation, saying that they have loads of people living in European countries and waiting for commands to attack the European people,” Mr. Sarfo recounted in an interview with The New York Times conducted in English inside the maximum- security prison near Bremen. “And that was before the Brussels attacks, before the Paris attacks.”
The masked man explained that the group needed more attackers in Germany and Britain, in particular. “They said, ‘Would you mind to go back to Germany, because that’s what we need at the moment,’ ” Mr. Sarfo recalled.
The operatives belonged to an intelligence unit of the Islamic State known in Arabic as the Emni, which has become a combination of an internal police force and an external operations branch, dedicated to exporting terror abroad, according to French, Belgian, German and Austrian intelligence and interrogation documents obtained by The Times.
The Islamic State’s attacks in Paris on November 13 brought global attention to the group’s external terrorism network, which began sending fighters abroad two years ago. Mr. Sarfo and other captured recruits describe coming in contact with a multilevel secret service under the overall command of the Islamic State’s most senior Syrian operative, spokesman and propaganda chief, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. Below him is a tier of lieutenants empowered to plan
attacks in different regions of the world, including a “secret service for European affairs,” a “secret service for Asian affairs” and a “secret service for Arab affairs,” according to Mr. Sarfo.
Based on the accounts of operatives arrested so far, the Emni has become the crucial cog in the group’s terrorism machinery, and its trainees led the Paris attacks and built the suitcase bombs used in a Brussels airport terminal and subway station. Investigation records show that its foot soldiers have also been sent to Austria, Germany, Spain, Lebanon, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Mr. Sarfo said he was told that undercover operatives in Europe used new converts as go- betweens, or “clean men,” who help link up people interested in carrying out attacks with operatives who can pass on instructions on everything from how to make a suicide vest to how to credit their violence to the Islamic State.
The group has sent “hundreds of operatives” back to the European Union, intelligence officials said.
The first port of call for new arrivals to the Islamic State is a network of dormitories in Syria, just across the border from Turkey.
Mr. Sarfo was fingerprinted, and a doctor came to draw a blood sample and perform a physical examination. A man with a laptop conducted an intake interview. “He was asking normal questions like: ‘What’s your name? What’s your second name? Who’s your mom? Where’s your mom originally from? What did you study? What degree do you have? What’s your ambition? What do you want to become?’ ” Mr. Sarfo said.
His background was also of interest. He was a regular at a radical mosque in Bremen that had already sent about 20 members to Syria, according to Daniel Heinke, the German Interior Ministry’s counterterrorism coordinator for the area. And he had served a one-year prison sentence for breaking into a supermarket safe and stealing 23,000 euros. A criminal past can be a valued asset, Mr. Sarfo said, “especially if they know you have ties to organized crime and they know you can get fake IDs, or they know you have contact men in Europe who can smuggle you into the European Union.”
On the third day after Mr. Sarfo’s arrival, the members of the Emni came to ask for him.
“They told me that there aren’t many people in Germany who are willing to do the job,” Mr. Sarfo said soon after his arrest last year. “They said they had some in the beginning. But one after another, you could say, they chickened out, because they got scared — cold feet. Same in England.”
By contrast, the group had more than enough volunteers for France.
Since the rise of the Islamic State over two years ago, intelligence agencies have been collecting information on the Emni.
“It’s the Emni that ensures the internal security inside Dawla” — the Arabic word for state — “and oversees external security by sending abroad people they recruited, or else sending individuals to carry out violent acts, like what happened in Tunisia inside the museum in Tunis, or else the aborted plot in Belgium,” said Nicolas Moreau, 32, a French citizen who was arrested last year after leaving the Islamic State in Syria.
Mr. Moreau explained that he had run a restaurant in Raqqa, Syria, the de facto capital of the group’s territory, where he had served meals to key members of the Emni — including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the onthe-ground commander of the Paris attacks, who was killed by the police days later.
Other interrogations, as well as Mr. Sarfo’s account, have led investigators to conclude that the Emni also trained and dispatched the gunman who opened fire on a beach in Sousse, Tunisia, in June, and the man who prepared the Brussels airport bombs.
Mr. Sarfo realized that they were preparing a global portfolio of terrorists and looking to fill holes in their international network, he said.
He described what he had been told about the group’s work to build an infrastructure in Bangladesh. There, a siege by a team of Islamic State gunmen left at least 20 hostages dead at a cafe last month, almost all of them foreigners.
One important region where the Emni is not thought to have succeeded in sending trained attackers is North America, Mr. Sarfo said.
Though dozens of Americans have become members of the Islamic State, and some have been recruited into the external operations wing, “they know it’s hard for them to get Americans into America” once they have traveled to Syria, he said.
“For America and Canada, it’s much easier for them to get them over the social network, because they say the Americans are dumb — they have open gun policies,” he said. “They say we can radicalize them easily, and if they have no prior record, they can buy guns, so we don’t need to have no contact man who has to provide guns for them.”
Training Days
Since late 2014, the Islamic State has instructed foreigners joining the group to make their trip look like a holiday in southern Turkey, including booking a return flight and paying for an all-inclusive vacation at a beach resort, from which smugglers arrange their transport into Syria, according to intelligence documents and Mr. Sarfo’s account.
That cover story creates pressure to keep things moving quickly during the recruits’ training in Syria, and most get just a few days of basic weapons practice, in some instances.
“When they go back to France or in Germany, they can say, ‘I was only on holidays in Turkey,’ ” Mr. Sarfo said.
Mr. Sarfo’s facility in both German and English — he studied construction at Newham College in East London — made him attractive as a potential attacker. Though the Emni approached him several times to ask him to return to Germany, he demurred, he said.
Eventually, Mr. Sarfo was drafted into the quwat khas, Arabic for special forces. Along with his German friend, he was driven to the desert outside Raqqa.
“They dropped us off in the middle of nowhere and told us, ‘ We are here,’ ” he said during an interrogation. “So we’re standing in the desert and thought to ourselves, ‘ What’s going on?’ ” When the two Germans looked more closely, they realized there were cavelike dwellings around them. Everything above ground was painted with mud so as to be invisible to drones.
“Showering was prohibited. Eating was prohibited, too, unless they gave it to you,” Mr. Sarfo said, adding that he had shared a cave with five or six others. Even drinking water was harshly rationed. “Each dwelling received two cups of water a day, put on the doorstep,” he said. “And the purpose of this was to test us, see who really wants it, who’s firm.”
The grueling training began: hours of running, jumping, push-ups, parallel bars, crawling. The recruits began fainting.
The punishment for failing to keep up was harsh. “There was one boy who refused to get up, because he was just too exhausted,” Mr. Sarfo told the authorities. “So they tied him to a pole with his legs and his arms and left him there.”
He learned that the special forces program had 10 levels of training. After he graduated to Level 2, he was moved to an island on a river in Tabqa, Syria. The recruits’ sleeping spots now consisted of holes in the ground, covered by sticks and twigs. They practiced swimming, scuba diving and navigating by the stars.
Throughout his training, Mr. Sarfo rubbed shoulders with an international cadre of recruits. When he first arrived at the desert campus, he ran laps alongside Moroccans, Egyptians, at least one Indonesian, a Canadian and a Belgian. And out on the island, he learned of similar special units, including one called Jaysh al-Khalifa, or the Army of the Caliphate.
The Big Man
Mr. Sarfo became closer with the emir of the camp, a Moroccan, who began to divulge details about how the Islamic State’s external operations effort was structured, he said. Mr. Sarfo learned that there was one outsize figure behind the group’s strategies and ambitions. “The big man behind everything is Abu Muhammad al-Adnani,” he said.
“He is the head of the Emni, and he is the head of the special forces as well,” Mr. Sarfo added. “Everything goes back to him.”
Born in the town of Binnish in northern Syria, Mr. Adnani is said to be 39, and is the subject of a $5 million American bounty.
Mr. Sarfo explained that when recruits to the special forces finished all 10 levels of training, they were blindfolded and driven to meet Mr. Adnani, where they pledged allegiance to him directly.
During his time in Syria, Mr. Sarfo was contacted by other German fighters who wanted him to be an actor in a propaganda film aimed at German speakers. They drove to Palmyra, and Mr. Sarfo was told to hold the group’s black flag and to walk again and again in front of the camera as they filmed repeated takes. Syrian captives were forced to kneel, and the other German fighters shot them, showing an interest only in the cinematic effect.
One turned to Mr. Sarfo immediately after killing a victim and asked: “How did I look like? Did I look good, the way I executed?”
Mr. Sarfo said he had started doubting his allegiance to ISIS during his training, after seeing how cruelly they treated those who could not keep up. Making the propaganda video provided his final disillusionment when he saw how many times they recorded each scene in the five-minute film. Back in Germany, when he had been inspired by similar videos, he had always assumed they were real, not staged.
He began plotting his escape, which took weeks and involved sprinting and crawling in a field of mud before crossing into Turkey. He was arrested at Bremen Airport, where he landed on July 20, 2015, and he voluntarily confessed. He is now serving a three-year term on terrorism charges.