The ISIS Papers: Behind 'Death Cult' Image Lies a Methodical Bureaucracy
By Shiv Malik
Posted 2015-12-07 20:58 GMT
John
Kerry has branded its members psychopathic monsters, François Hollande
calls them barbarians, and David Cameron describes them as a death
cult. But Islamic State is much more than that.
As newly obtained documents demonstrate, Isis is also made up of bureaucrats, civil servants and jobsworths. Hundreds if not thousands of cadres have set themselves to work creating rules and regulations on everything from fishing and dress codes to the sale of counterfeit brands and university admission systems.
About 340 official documents, notices, receipts, and internal memos seen by the Guardian show that they have been trying to rebuild everything from roads to nurseries to hotels to marketplaces, from the Euphrates to the Tigris. They have also established 16 centralised departments including one for public health and a natural resources department that oversees oil and antiquities.
This has been the plan all along. A 24-page statecraft blueprint obtained by the Guardian, written in the months after Isis's declaration of a caliphate, shows how deliberate the state-building exercise has been, and how central it is to its overall aims.
Examined together the Isis papers build a highly detailed picture of what is going on in the militants' putative state.
In the early days after the declaration of the caliphate in June 2014, the emphasis was on regulations on dress and behaviour. These included a prohibition on selling and displaying tight-fitting and "ornamented" garments. Fatwas were issued on playing billiards and table football. And in one of the more bizarre rulings, Isis banned rooftop pigeon-keeping because it was deemed a waste of time.
Then around the turn of this year, Isis appeared to seize the momentum, issuing a slew of documents directly relating to state building and job creation.
It posted notices advertising job opportunities within the newly established department of zakat or tithes -- akin to a social services department. On the education front, there were announcements about the beginning of the school term, the opening of a kindergarten and recruitment for teachers.
Isis's civil servants also issued agricultural plans for the summer growing season and a plethora of civil regulations, those that have nothing to do with a specific ideology, such for drivers (they must carry "a comprehensive repair toolkit" at all times) and shop owners (they must not block the pavement with goods without a licence).
During the past five months there has been a noticeable rise in the number of documents relating to security measures and military mobilisation; Isis is becoming increasingly paranoid.
There has been a complete prohibition on private Wi-Fi networks, notices have been issued to checkpoints to crack down on smuggling of gold, copper and iron, and at the start of October the group issued an amnesty for military deserters -- presumably because it needs more soldiers.
At the same time, fearing traitors in their midst, the department of public security has ordered anyone previously associated with "enemies of the state" to immediately register themselves.
That is the general chronological progression of Isis, but there are several themes that cut across this timeline.
In trying to assert its jurisdiction across what were once two separate countries, Isis is engaged in a programme of unification. This is apparent in the issuing of standard work IDs and the campaign to, as the group puts it, "break the borders".
To that end Isis has created a new district, Euphrates Province, which falls over both sides of the international boundary, and has been busily issuing regulations like the rest of the group's dozen or so provinces.
Where Isis struggles on this front is with tertiary education -- the differences in the Syrian and Iraqi secondary systems have made it too hard to create a unified university admissions system -- and the currency, where it still deals in Syrian pounds, Iraqi dinars and the ubiquitous US dollar.
In wider economic matters, Isis appears to have little patience with Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and has been enforcing rent and price controls on a whole variety of goods and services from caesarean sections ($70/£46) to sugar (70 cents per kg). But the caliphate is not implementing Soviet-style levels of economic control. It allows private citizens to own property, run businesses and carry out state projects such as road building.
A copy of a payment order goes into some fascinating detail. In return for having asphalted the Iraq-Syria highway that runs alongside the right bank of the Euphrates river and planting it with trees, "so as not to expose the forces of the Islamic State" to aerial assault, someone going by the name of Abu Dujana al-Libi was paid $100,000.
One of the most striking documents reveals how Isis is making its money. A six-page monthly financial statement for Deir ez-Zor province for January 2015 shows total monthly revenue was $8.4m (£5.6m) -- handsome for a terrorist group, but pitiful for a state.
Taxes generated 23.7% of its income while oil and gas sales made up 27.7%. If that figure is correct then, as Tamimi notes, daily revenues from Isis's most oil rich province yielded $66,400 dollars a day -- nothing like estimates of $3m a day that have been bandied around.
But topping both oil sales and taxes are "confiscations". Isis has been fining smugglers of outlawed goods such as cigarettes -- including the electronic kind -- and auctioning off property seized from designated enemies of the state. This activity made up a whopping 45% of its income, almost as much as natural resources and taxes put together.
On the expenditure side, 63.5% of the province's cash was spent on soldiers' salaries and upkeep for military bases. And only 17.7% was used for public services.
On the expenditure side, 63.5% of the province's cash was spent on soldiers' salaries and upkeep for military bases. And only 17.7% was used for public services.
Blueprint
The overarching document sets out a theory of government, a civil servant's handbook.
Entitled Principles in the Administration of the Islamic State it is Isis's blueprint for statecraft. The memorandum is marked for internal use only and is meant to be a foundation text for the "cadres of administrators" which Isis wishes to train.
Each of the 24 pages is decorated with a sword and its final page is signed by "Abu Abdullah al Masri [Father of Abdullah the Egyptian]". The Guardian has not been able to discover any further information about the author but the anti-Isis organisation, Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered, references a man with the same nomme de guerre working as the chief of the electricity grid.
Charlie Winter, a senior research associate at Georgia State University, says the document tells a story "totally consistent" with his own research into Isis's propaganda.
"It is exacting and comprehensive, something which is testament to the fact that, at the highest levels, IS is focused on entrenching its political longevity, not just military relevance," he said.
Split into 10 chapters and written in a bureaucratic style, the document begins with a potted history of the caliphate and what came before it, stressing that well trained administrators are at the heart of Isis's survival and separate it from all other jihadi groups.
"The state requires an Islamic system of life, a Qur'anic constitution and a system to implement it," it says, and goes on: "There must not be suppression of the role of qualifications, skills of expertise and the training of the current generation on administering the state."
Isis appears to have numerous categories of civil servants including those for statistics, finance, admin and accounts.
The blueprint then goes on to lay out plans for future departments, including the military, education, public services and media relations.
The chapter focussing on media strategy sets out the need for a central media organisation supported by provincial and auxiliary agencies. Winter says that the way has grown to understand how the media offices function is precisely what is laid out. "It is exactly the structure I had mapped out."
There's also a long section on how to administer military camps, specifying three types: "first preparation" camps for regular initiates; continuation camps for veterans who will be sent there annually for two weeks; and camps for children.
Describing the camps for veterans it says they will be taught the "latest arts of using weapons, military planning and military technologies ... along with detailed commentary on the technologies of enemy use ... and how the soldiers of the state can take advantage of them".
It specifies that children should receive training in light arms and religious indoctrination and that "outstanding individuals" will be given security assignments such as manning checkpoints.
The main body of the text discusses the centrality of natural resources. While committees will, it says, "administer production projects", the blueprint is explicit about allowing individuals to invest in all areas of economic life, except in the sensitive areas of oil or gas extraction.
Describing the importance of education, it describes it as "the foundational brick on which Islamic society is built.".
One further paragraph hints at the desire to be self-sufficient in the future by "raising a knowledgeable Islamic generation capable of bearing the Ummah [Islamic Nation] and its future without needing the expertise of the west."
The retired general Stanley McChrystal, who led coalition forces in Afghanistan and was credited with leading the special operations units in Iraq that killed Isis's founding member Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, described the playbook as required reading.
He said: "It seems a far cry from something produced by an organisation that routinely commits horrific acts of seemingly mindless brutality. And that may be the most chilling aspect. If the west sees Isis as an almost stereotypical band of psychopathic killers, we risk dramatically underestimating them."
Lt Gen Mike Flynn, who retired in August 2014 after three years as the US's chief military intelligence gatherer, heading up the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), said that a "totally incoherent" and "piecemeal" western military strategy has given Isis time to organise itself.
Describing the playbook as a "very legitimate document", he added: "The tendency for the Islamic State to act as a state is growing. And any time that they get to do that is to their advantage."
The source
The documents have come to light via a 23-year-old researcher from Cardiff, Aymenn al-Tamimi.
Tamimi spends his nights scouring Facebook, Twitter and internet forums in order to compile his trove of primary source material -about 300 documents relating to the state Isis is attempting to build.
"It occurred to me one evening to do something on Isis administration ... because for a time some documents had come out, not released officially by [Isis]; exam timetables and pharmaceutical price controls," he said.
Tamimi believes the records say more about Isis than the propaganda it releases everyday. Most of his archive is made up of photos of official pronouncements that have been pinned to notice boards or documents that have been handed to people individually such as education texts, receipts or forms. When Tamimi finds a document, he then meticulously verifies, translates into English, and logs it on his website alongside the original where it is open to scrutiny from around the globe.
But it is not just through the internet that he makes his discoveries. Since beginning this work at the start of the year, journalists and fellow analysts pass him documents and he has on one occasion travelled inside Syria to cultivate insider connections.
The connections have now borne fruit. One source, a trader working inside Isis territory, gave him about 30 officially stamped memos, pronouncements and internal Isis texts including the two most significant finds to date, the monthly financial statement and the statecraft playbook.
Separately, the Guardian has also obtained documents from Kurdish forces who seized the town of Tel Abyad on the Turkish border during this summer and materials dating from 2013 relating to local Isis military structure, discovered by Free Syrian Army forces fighting in Aleppo province.
Additional reporting by Mona Mahmood, Alice Ross and Muhammed Almahmoud.
As newly obtained documents demonstrate, Isis is also made up of bureaucrats, civil servants and jobsworths. Hundreds if not thousands of cadres have set themselves to work creating rules and regulations on everything from fishing and dress codes to the sale of counterfeit brands and university admission systems.
About 340 official documents, notices, receipts, and internal memos seen by the Guardian show that they have been trying to rebuild everything from roads to nurseries to hotels to marketplaces, from the Euphrates to the Tigris. They have also established 16 centralised departments including one for public health and a natural resources department that oversees oil and antiquities.
This has been the plan all along. A 24-page statecraft blueprint obtained by the Guardian, written in the months after Isis's declaration of a caliphate, shows how deliberate the state-building exercise has been, and how central it is to its overall aims.
Examined together the Isis papers build a highly detailed picture of what is going on in the militants' putative state.
In the early days after the declaration of the caliphate in June 2014, the emphasis was on regulations on dress and behaviour. These included a prohibition on selling and displaying tight-fitting and "ornamented" garments. Fatwas were issued on playing billiards and table football. And in one of the more bizarre rulings, Isis banned rooftop pigeon-keeping because it was deemed a waste of time.
Then around the turn of this year, Isis appeared to seize the momentum, issuing a slew of documents directly relating to state building and job creation.
It posted notices advertising job opportunities within the newly established department of zakat or tithes -- akin to a social services department. On the education front, there were announcements about the beginning of the school term, the opening of a kindergarten and recruitment for teachers.
Isis's civil servants also issued agricultural plans for the summer growing season and a plethora of civil regulations, those that have nothing to do with a specific ideology, such for drivers (they must carry "a comprehensive repair toolkit" at all times) and shop owners (they must not block the pavement with goods without a licence).
During the past five months there has been a noticeable rise in the number of documents relating to security measures and military mobilisation; Isis is becoming increasingly paranoid.
There has been a complete prohibition on private Wi-Fi networks, notices have been issued to checkpoints to crack down on smuggling of gold, copper and iron, and at the start of October the group issued an amnesty for military deserters -- presumably because it needs more soldiers.
At the same time, fearing traitors in their midst, the department of public security has ordered anyone previously associated with "enemies of the state" to immediately register themselves.
That is the general chronological progression of Isis, but there are several themes that cut across this timeline.
In trying to assert its jurisdiction across what were once two separate countries, Isis is engaged in a programme of unification. This is apparent in the issuing of standard work IDs and the campaign to, as the group puts it, "break the borders".
To that end Isis has created a new district, Euphrates Province, which falls over both sides of the international boundary, and has been busily issuing regulations like the rest of the group's dozen or so provinces.
Where Isis struggles on this front is with tertiary education -- the differences in the Syrian and Iraqi secondary systems have made it too hard to create a unified university admissions system -- and the currency, where it still deals in Syrian pounds, Iraqi dinars and the ubiquitous US dollar.
In wider economic matters, Isis appears to have little patience with Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and has been enforcing rent and price controls on a whole variety of goods and services from caesarean sections ($70/£46) to sugar (70 cents per kg). But the caliphate is not implementing Soviet-style levels of economic control. It allows private citizens to own property, run businesses and carry out state projects such as road building.
A copy of a payment order goes into some fascinating detail. In return for having asphalted the Iraq-Syria highway that runs alongside the right bank of the Euphrates river and planting it with trees, "so as not to expose the forces of the Islamic State" to aerial assault, someone going by the name of Abu Dujana al-Libi was paid $100,000.
One of the most striking documents reveals how Isis is making its money. A six-page monthly financial statement for Deir ez-Zor province for January 2015 shows total monthly revenue was $8.4m (£5.6m) -- handsome for a terrorist group, but pitiful for a state.
Taxes generated 23.7% of its income while oil and gas sales made up 27.7%. If that figure is correct then, as Tamimi notes, daily revenues from Isis's most oil rich province yielded $66,400 dollars a day -- nothing like estimates of $3m a day that have been bandied around.
But topping both oil sales and taxes are "confiscations". Isis has been fining smugglers of outlawed goods such as cigarettes -- including the electronic kind -- and auctioning off property seized from designated enemies of the state. This activity made up a whopping 45% of its income, almost as much as natural resources and taxes put together.
On the expenditure side, 63.5% of the province's cash was spent on soldiers' salaries and upkeep for military bases. And only 17.7% was used for public services.
On the expenditure side, 63.5% of the province's cash was spent on soldiers' salaries and upkeep for military bases. And only 17.7% was used for public services.
Blueprint
The overarching document sets out a theory of government, a civil servant's handbook.
Entitled Principles in the Administration of the Islamic State it is Isis's blueprint for statecraft. The memorandum is marked for internal use only and is meant to be a foundation text for the "cadres of administrators" which Isis wishes to train.
Each of the 24 pages is decorated with a sword and its final page is signed by "Abu Abdullah al Masri [Father of Abdullah the Egyptian]". The Guardian has not been able to discover any further information about the author but the anti-Isis organisation, Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered, references a man with the same nomme de guerre working as the chief of the electricity grid.
Charlie Winter, a senior research associate at Georgia State University, says the document tells a story "totally consistent" with his own research into Isis's propaganda.
"It is exacting and comprehensive, something which is testament to the fact that, at the highest levels, IS is focused on entrenching its political longevity, not just military relevance," he said.
Split into 10 chapters and written in a bureaucratic style, the document begins with a potted history of the caliphate and what came before it, stressing that well trained administrators are at the heart of Isis's survival and separate it from all other jihadi groups.
"The state requires an Islamic system of life, a Qur'anic constitution and a system to implement it," it says, and goes on: "There must not be suppression of the role of qualifications, skills of expertise and the training of the current generation on administering the state."
Isis appears to have numerous categories of civil servants including those for statistics, finance, admin and accounts.
The blueprint then goes on to lay out plans for future departments, including the military, education, public services and media relations.
The chapter focussing on media strategy sets out the need for a central media organisation supported by provincial and auxiliary agencies. Winter says that the way has grown to understand how the media offices function is precisely what is laid out. "It is exactly the structure I had mapped out."
There's also a long section on how to administer military camps, specifying three types: "first preparation" camps for regular initiates; continuation camps for veterans who will be sent there annually for two weeks; and camps for children.
Describing the camps for veterans it says they will be taught the "latest arts of using weapons, military planning and military technologies ... along with detailed commentary on the technologies of enemy use ... and how the soldiers of the state can take advantage of them".
It specifies that children should receive training in light arms and religious indoctrination and that "outstanding individuals" will be given security assignments such as manning checkpoints.
The main body of the text discusses the centrality of natural resources. While committees will, it says, "administer production projects", the blueprint is explicit about allowing individuals to invest in all areas of economic life, except in the sensitive areas of oil or gas extraction.
Describing the importance of education, it describes it as "the foundational brick on which Islamic society is built.".
One further paragraph hints at the desire to be self-sufficient in the future by "raising a knowledgeable Islamic generation capable of bearing the Ummah [Islamic Nation] and its future without needing the expertise of the west."
The retired general Stanley McChrystal, who led coalition forces in Afghanistan and was credited with leading the special operations units in Iraq that killed Isis's founding member Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, described the playbook as required reading.
He said: "It seems a far cry from something produced by an organisation that routinely commits horrific acts of seemingly mindless brutality. And that may be the most chilling aspect. If the west sees Isis as an almost stereotypical band of psychopathic killers, we risk dramatically underestimating them."
Lt Gen Mike Flynn, who retired in August 2014 after three years as the US's chief military intelligence gatherer, heading up the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), said that a "totally incoherent" and "piecemeal" western military strategy has given Isis time to organise itself.
Describing the playbook as a "very legitimate document", he added: "The tendency for the Islamic State to act as a state is growing. And any time that they get to do that is to their advantage."
The source
The documents have come to light via a 23-year-old researcher from Cardiff, Aymenn al-Tamimi.
Tamimi spends his nights scouring Facebook, Twitter and internet forums in order to compile his trove of primary source material -about 300 documents relating to the state Isis is attempting to build.
"It occurred to me one evening to do something on Isis administration ... because for a time some documents had come out, not released officially by [Isis]; exam timetables and pharmaceutical price controls," he said.
Tamimi believes the records say more about Isis than the propaganda it releases everyday. Most of his archive is made up of photos of official pronouncements that have been pinned to notice boards or documents that have been handed to people individually such as education texts, receipts or forms. When Tamimi finds a document, he then meticulously verifies, translates into English, and logs it on his website alongside the original where it is open to scrutiny from around the globe.
But it is not just through the internet that he makes his discoveries. Since beginning this work at the start of the year, journalists and fellow analysts pass him documents and he has on one occasion travelled inside Syria to cultivate insider connections.
The connections have now borne fruit. One source, a trader working inside Isis territory, gave him about 30 officially stamped memos, pronouncements and internal Isis texts including the two most significant finds to date, the monthly financial statement and the statecraft playbook.
Separately, the Guardian has also obtained documents from Kurdish forces who seized the town of Tel Abyad on the Turkish border during this summer and materials dating from 2013 relating to local Isis military structure, discovered by Free Syrian Army forces fighting in Aleppo province.
Additional reporting by Mona Mahmood, Alice Ross and Muhammed Almahmoud.
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