The Daesh files
Leaked records reveal striking diversity of recruits and debunk the theory of a common terrorist profile
Entry date. Blood type. DOB and Nationality. Education. Employment. Would you like to be a fighter, martyr, security guard or administrator?
These are the questions Daesh recruits answer on an entry form when joining the group. Bureaucracy is not something that leaps to mind when thinking of terrorists, but Daesh has proven meticulous in its record-keeping and data entry.
In recent months, Daesh defectors have been leaking these to journalists and academics, providing an intriguing snapshot of who joins the group and how. One database, which lists more than 4,000 members, including information on 16 Canadians, was shared by researcher Amarnath Amarasingam and analyzed by Toronto Star data spe- cialist Andrew Bailey.
The most striking information gleaned is the vast diversity of recruits, debunking theories that there is a common Daesh profile.
There’s a horse trainer from Saudi Arabia and a sailor from Dagestan, a geography teacher from Ukraine, a bodyguard, a restaurant owner, an Australian construction worker, a Tunisian motorcycle repairman with a seventh-grade education, a martial arts coach, a Belgian car salesman and an Egyptian dentist.
There is a self-described “popular drug dealer” from Indonesia, a Lebanese hotel manager, a British electronics engineer and a supermarket clerk from the Netherlands. There are seven doctors, two from Egypt and one each from Britain, France, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Syria.
One recruit calls himself a “witch doctor.” There’s a mobile phone dealer from Germany and a surprising number of barbers from Uzbekistan.
Of the 4,078 entries, the average birth year is 1988, which means most recruits were 25 or 26 when they arrived in Syria between 2013 and 2014, the period covered by the database. But more than 770 recruits are under the age of 21.
Information about the Canadians matched 12 names already public — recruits from Ontario, Alberta and Quebec. The identities of the remaining four cannot be confirmed, including a 30-year-old Toronto man who goes by the name Abu Musa al Kanadi and says he was a chemical engineering student. He did not include any contact numbers in his registration form. A man who answered the phone number listed by another Canadian man said he had already spoken to CSIS and the RCMP but that his brother was in Saskatchewan, not Syria. He would not provide contact information.
The number of recruits going to Syria peaked in July 2014, after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the group’s caliphate.
The categories that list recruiters and those who facilitate travel would likely be valuable intelligence for law enforcement agencies trying to stem the flow of fighters. The name Abu Muhammad al-Shimali is listed in more than 1,000 entries as a facilitator. While this is a kunya, or nickname, and difficult to confirm an identity, there is a wellknown Daesh member who goes by that name and is being sought in connection with the 2015 Paris attacks.
The U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice program lists 36year-old Saudi citizen Tirad al-Jarba, known as Abu Muhammad al-Shimali, as the leader of the “Immigration and Logistics Committee,” and is responsible for facilitating the travel of foreign fighters primarily through Gaziantep, Turkey, and on- ward to the Daesh-controlled border town of Jarabulus, Syria.
Four of the Canadians in the database — Zakria Habibi and Samir Halilovic from Sherbrooke, Que., as well as a Montreal recruit and Abu Musa al Kanadi — list al-Shimali as their contact and state they entered through Jarabulus.
There are 19 others who list Canada as a country where they had travelled before coming to Syria. Among them is Erius Alliu, an Albanian-born American, who stated that he had lived as a child in Greece before mov- ing with his family to Canada in 2002. Seven years later, he moved to Boston and worked as a cook before travelling to Syria in 2014. The 19year-old claims he paid a taxi driver in Turkey $650 to reach the border and then paid another $400 to be smuggled into Syria.
The majority of recruits in the database are from Saudi Arabia, but Tunisians make up the largest percentage per population, which is consistent with statistics compiled by security services and academics.
It is not unusual for terrorist groups to operate like corporations. When Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, a trove of Al Qaeda communications were discovered in the leader’s compound. The “Abbottabad Documents” revealed the inner workings of the group and the disputes between bin Laden and leaders of Al Qaeda branches around the world.
Journalist Rukmini Callimachi also discovered thousands of pages of internal documents written by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and left behind when members fled Timbuktu, Mali, in 2013. Those letters revealed vital intelligence about the group’s lucrative kidnapping business and that AQIM chastised troublesome members who failed to turn in expense reports.
Daesh’s close monitoring of its members does not come as a sur- prise for those once involved with the group. Daesh may easily accept foreigners and use them to recruit and as propaganda stars, but they are also wary that some may be spies, or trying to defect.
“They’re watched 24 hours a day,” a Syrian Daesh defector, who went by the name Abu Hanzala, told me in an interview last October, from the Turkish border town of Sanliurfa.
He had joined Daesh in January 2014, after they took over the Syrian town where he lived and had fought President Bashar Assad’s regime, first alongside the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, then Jabhat al-Nusra, Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch.
But he eventually became disillusioned — mainly due to the arrogance of the foreign fighters, who he said were more interested in battling other rebel groups for supremacy than the Syrian government. He blamed the Saudis in particular, saying their religious fatwas made life unbearable.
He chain-smoked during our interviews, just one of the many practices considered haram — forbidden — under Daesh’s rules.
Abu Hanzala, who left the group late last year, said he had sympathy for some of the western members. “Those who came from outside didn’t find what they expected and they’re trapped.”