AL BAGHDADI’S BROTHER TRACKED ON COURIER ROUTE TO ISTANBUL
▶ Iraqi intelligence officials say ISIS leader’s sibling Juma made regular trips to Europe’s largest city from northern Syria
A brother of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi travelled several times to Istanbul, Europe’s largest city, from northern Syria in the months before the terrorist chief’s death.
Acting as one of his most trusted messengers, the brother delivered and retrieved information about the group’s operations in Syria, Iraq and Turkey, according to two Iraqi intelligence officials.
The hunt for the elusive architect of ISIS, a man once known as the “invisible sheikh”, concluded on October 26 in a dramatic, covert US special forces raid on his villa in the north-western Syrian border village of Barisha, in Idlib province.
Backed into a tunnel with no escape, Al Baghdadi killed himself by detonating an explosive vest, US President Donald Trump said.
Now The National can reveal new details about the movements of one of the key members of the terrorist leader’s inner circle and how he made several 2,300-kilometre round trips deep into the territory of a Nato member.
Also revealed is the terrorism chief’s use of an old-fashioned militant method to evade detection while directing the group from the shadows, despite the efforts of western and Middle Eastern security services to identify a trail that could lead them to one of the most wanted men in the world.
“We were watching somebody who was acting as a messenger to Al Baghdadi, and he was travelling frequently to Turkey and back,” said a senior Iraqi intelligence official. “He was Al Baghdadi’s brother.”
That brother was Juma, one of Al Baghdadi’s three male siblings, who is believed to be still alive.
Iraqi security services first detected him crossing the Syrian-Turkish border at the end of last year, before he appeared in the country’s largest city, where ISIS militants or sympathisers had attacked a nightclub on New Year’s Eve, tourists in its historic Sultanahmet Square near Hagia Sophia and its nowclosed Ataturk International Airport.
Iraqi security services worked with their American counterparts on the surveillance of Juma inside Turkish territory, the officials said.
Spokesmen for the Pentagon and US-led coalition to defeat ISIS said they would not comment on intelligence matters.
The Turkish presidency office
How come Turkey did not stop this person? It just doesn’t add up. It is risky for someone like him to go to Istanbul AHMET YAYLA Former Turkish counterterrorism chief
and the Turkish interior ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
An Iraqi intelligence agent who worked directly on the operation to track Juma said the terrorist leader’s brother continued to reappear in the following months, until his last recorded visit to Istanbul in April.
He is then believed to have returned to north-western Syria, months before the location of his brother’s safe house was revealed. It is unlikely he was smuggled across the border, the agent said, but rather moved across it freely.
The Iraqi operatives cultivated an asset in Istanbul who would become privy to details about Juma’s Istanbul trips and what was changing hands on behalf of Al Baghdadi.
Juma made several visits to Istanbul to meet that contact, the agent said. The source met a courier who would hand packages to an appointed middleman. That intermediary would then pass the packages on to Al Baghdadi’s brother for delivery to the terrorist chief in northern Syria, the agent said.
The contents of the packages exchanged in Istanbul reveal how Al Baghdadi continued to direct the group and the lengths he went to remain abreast of its progress without detection even after years in hiding and months after the loss of all of the Syrian and Iraqi cities the group had once controlled.
“He was delivering messages from ISIS commanders in Iraq. The state of their forces, money, logistics, routes,” the agent said of the courier.
“[He] was in contact with commanders here [in Iraq].”
Even though the Iraqis and the Americans jointly tracked the go-between for five months, the official said it remained unclear if he was handing over the packages in person, and if that was done in Idlib.
This was because they would lose track of him when he entered the extremist-laden Syrian province where Al Baghdadi was eventually found.
The officials wondered why his trail would end in Idlib, as they believed Al Baghdadi was hiding in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor. They also asked how his brother could transit territory held by the Syrian regime or the Syrian
Democratic Forces, the Arab-Kurdish coalition that led the ground fight against ISIS, to deliver messages to him.
“We tracked him going across the border but then we were losing track. From Turkey he travelled south through Idlib but it seems like he never travelled farther down,” the intelligence official said.
“Now, we think that he just came across five clicks [5km] away from the border to meet Al Baghdadi. We don’t know if the Turks knew this or not.”
It is believed Al Baghdadi moved to Idlib in spring, around the time of the offensive to wrest Baghouz, ISIS’s last pocket, from its remaining fighters. But the Iraqi claims indicate he could have moved there before then, or somewhere closer to Idlib and further away from eastern Syria than previously believed.
Little is known about Juma. No picture of him is publicly available nor are details of his appearance, age or current whereabouts. As efforts to track his movements continue, much of the information about him remains classified.
A US special forces team captured two men in the Barisha raid on Al Baghdadi’s compound, but it is unclear if Juma was one of them, or if he was present at the safe house at the time of the mission.
The Iraqi officials said they do not have clear details of who was killed or knowledge of who was captured in the raid.
Juma practised an ultra-conservative version of Islam rooted in ISIS’s ideology well before Baghdadi, Abu Ahmad, a former associate of the ISIS leader, said in 2015.
At one point, he is believed to have become Baghdadi’s bodyguard and was the closest to him out of the three brothers.
But the account of the officials reveals that, at least in recent months, he served instead as a conveyor of Baghdadi’s orders to key ISIS figures in Turkey and Iraq.
His methods of travel from northern Syria to Istanbul and back, and the route he chose to take, remain unknown.
But the ability of one of the most senior members of ISIS to commute to a major European city freely to meet other ISIS members will again raise questions about the Turkish security services and what they knew about Al Baghdadi’s final months, former Turkish security officials and counter-terrorism experts said.
Accusations against Ankara have not been supported by hard evidence, but many in security circles point to a passive attitude in the Turkish security apparatus towards ISIS that allowed the extremists to build sophisticated networks inside the country.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government is facing criticism after Al Baghdadi was found so close to the Turkish border. Ankara also stands accused of emboldening ISIS with its offensive against the Syrian Kurds in north-eastern Syria using rebel proxies accused of potential war crimes.
Turkey on Tuesday said it had captured Al Baghdadi’s 65-year-old sister, Rasmiya Awad, near the Syrian town of Azaz. But former officials said she probably had little to do with ISIS’s operations. They said her arrest was an attempt to appear to be working against ISIS in the face of criticism.
“For the Turkish National Intelligence, or Turkish police, [ISIS] are not the real enemy,” said Ahmet Yayla, a former Turkish counter-terrorism police chief and now a fellow at the
George Washington University Programme on Extremism.
“They do not seriously look for these people, but Erdogan is [now] in a position where he is trying to prove that he is fighting against ISIS.”
On Juma’s apparent freedom to travel, Mr Yayla expressed reservations that someone so close to Al Baghdadi could have made such a long journey to Istanbul to deliver or retrieve messages without being detected, or had chosen it as a location for meetings instead of closer Turkish border cities like Gaziantep or Sanliurfa.
“How come Turkey did not stop this person? It just doesn’t add up. It is risky for someone like him to go to Istanbul. This is a strange world, anything can happen, but I wouldn’t expect such a mistake from someone like him,” Mr Yayla said.
One theory about Al Baghdadi hiding near the Turkish border is that he was trying to move his family to the country.
“This is not unknown among [ISIS] officials and leaders,” said Aymenn Al Tamimi, a prominent researcher.
Istanbul may have offered a more attractive location for ISIS’s leadership to remain undetected compared to wellknown extremist hotbeds in southern Turkey.
“Istanbul has always been a relatively safe area to travel. There are many refugees. It’s easy to get lost in the crowd,” the Iraqi agent said.
In a city of at least 15 million people, “you can expect a degree of anonymity”, said a former western intelligence chief.
“You’re not under scrutiny – everybody is there.”
In smaller, southern hubs such as Gaziantep, it “would be much harder to be sure that you weren’t being followed or spotted”.
For a Syrian or Iraqi who doesn’t have a criminal record and who has the right papers, travelling through Turkey “is not a big problem”, said Guido Steinberg, senior research associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and former counter-extremism adviser to chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
“Although it’s 1,000 kilometres, for the Turks it’s not considered to be a long distance. You enter the bus and that’s it. You’ve got direct connections to Istanbul from every city.”
In Turkey, ISIS has a leader of its Emni intelligence service, responsible for the group’s foreign operations, and thousands of supporters developing networks that have made it easy to move people and money throughout the country, Mr Yayla said.
So, it may have made more sense for Al Baghdadi to use another lieutenant for the job.
But Juma had became “one of the few people trusted by” Al Baghdadi, the Iraqi agent said.
As ISIS’s territory and leadership figures began to dwindle, so did Al Baghdadi’s reliance on his commanders and foot soldiers, figures who may have arrived in Iraq or Syria only six years ago.
“It seems clear now that towards the end, Al Baghdadi only trusted some very close family members,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, an expert on ISIS and senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London.
“It also seems to be the case that key pieces of info that led to his capture also came from the people he placed his trust in towards the end.”
Even though he was being traced by other security services, Juma’s limited profile could have helped him to evade detection by Turkish security services while travelling through the country, said Colin Clarke, senior research fellow at the Soufan Centre.
“I assume they have the family network mapped out but it’s not Al Baghdadi himself. So how well known were his relatives? What did he look like?”
The trailing of Juma did not lead to Al Baghdadi’s attempted capture. An informant cultivated by the Syrian Kurds inside Al Baghdadi’s inner circle and several crucial arrests of his associates would prove to be his downfall.
But the tracking of Juma reveals yet another strand of intelligence that security services were following in the hope of capturing Baghdadi.
The use of a courier is a tried and tested method of evading detection used by extremist leaders in a bid to operate under the radar. It was one mastered by former Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who would send confidants over long distances with USB drives to internet cafes to pass on information.
Since then, militant evasion tactics have moved from email drafts to secure email services and on to encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.
Al Baghdadi was obsessed with secrecy, turning to handwritten notes or even word of mouth to send messages, and at times dressing as a shepherd, his detained brother-in-law Mohammed Ali Sajit, told Al Arabiya television channel last week.
Those who visited him were often blindfolded on the drive to his location, while others were forced to hand over their watches and phones.
Going dark, like bin Laden did for 10 years, can be easy, but terrorist leaders come unstuck in their failure to reconcile their need for stealth with their need to communicate as heads of these organisations, said Jason Burke, an expert on extremism.
“You can go off grid and stay off grid, but it’s difficult to communicate,” he said.
“Those who are looking for you are basically guessing. But if you need to trust somebody [to courier], they are going to be identifiable.”
The Iraqis and Americans did not make a move on Juma.
“In this case, the brother would not have been the target, he was just a means to the target. I think it’s entirely understandable that you might let him run and see what turns up,” said the former western intelligence chief.