ISIS recruits’ addresses, phone numbers leaked by defector in major intelligence break

In what could be a major intelligence break in the war against the Islamic State, American and European officials are poring over a list of some 22,000 suspected Islamic State recruits — including operatives from the U.S., Britain and Canada — whose addresses and phone numbers were on a memory stick leaked to a British news organization by a purported defector from the Syria-based terrorist group.

While some intelligence sources claimed the information made public this week by Sky News was largely outdated or already known to authorities, others said it represented an invaluable window into the secretive world of jihadis from 51 nations who have joined the operation, also known as ISIS and ISIL.

Among the more chilling nuggets is a file marked “Martyrs,” detailing an Islamic State brigade manned entirely by fighters seeking and trained to carry out suicide attacks. Other documents included information on routes traveled by foreign recruits between their home nations and the Islamic State’s stronghold in Syria and Iraq.

The documents come amid heated debate over the extent to which the various international military campaigns against the Islamic State — by the U.S. and its allies, and by Syrian, Russian, Iraqi and Iranian forces — are affecting the terrorist group’s global reach.

Pentagon officials have vowed this week that a revamped U.S. effort to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels to battle the Islamic State on the ground won’t repeat the mistakes that doomed a similar program last year.

Army Gen. Joseph Votel, President Obama’s choice to be the next U.S. commander for the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the new approach will be more of a “thickening effort” than the previous effort, which aimed to raise a large defensive force against the Islamic State.

’Omar the Chechen’ survives?

Separately, there were signs Thursday that a recent American airstrike targeting one of Islamic State’s top military commanders in Syria was not as successful as U.S. officials had hoped.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that Abu Omar al-Shishani, also known as “Omar the Chechen,” was injured but had survived the March 4 airstrike.

Born in 1986 in Georgia, which was then part of the Soviet Union, the red-bearded jihadi was a close adviser to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Bill Roggio, a senior fellow on terrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said there is often difficulty in determining whether a top jihadi commander has been killed or survived such a strike.

“Without possession of a body for positive identification, intelligence services must rely on other means to determine his status,” Mr. Roggio wrote Thursday in the foundation’s Long War Journal. “Often, the best way to know whether a leader was killed or not is to get confirmation from the jihadists themselves, as they wish to eulogize their leaders.”

“This usually is reliable,” he added, “but you cannot rule out the possibility that various groups are obscuring the status of their leaders.”

Similar uncertainty has surrounded the revelation of the memory stick with Arabic language documents, purportedly containing the identities of thousands of Islamic State recruits from around the world.

While Sky News initially made headlines with the information, the material was reportedly also obtained by a Syrian newspaper and by Germany’s intelligence agency, and was being examined by U.S. and British intelligence by Thursday. German officials, including Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, said they were confident the lead was authentic and matched the format of other internal Islamic State documents obtained by Western intelligence services.

Too good to be true?

The Syrian opposition news website Zaman al-Wasl said there were thousands of repetitions in the materials and that names of only 1,700 people could be identified in documents believed to be forms that were filled out by Islamic State recruits.

Some intelligence analysts cast doubt on the authenticity of the cache because of the appearance of mistakes and uncharacteristic language on the documents.

For instance, the Arabic name for “The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” the group’s previous nomenclature, is written in two different ways, including one that is not consistent with past practice.

Files documenting the deaths of certain militants also use the words “date of killing” instead of the typical jihadi term “martyrdom,” and some of the documents reportedly feature a circular logo not previously seen on Islamic State paperwork.

“There would be big alarm bells for me, because when I’ve seen inconsistencies like that in the past, they’ve been on really shoddily made forgeries,” Charlie Winter, a researcher at Georgia State University, told the Agence France-Presse news service.

Information about Islamic State has been swirling through media and intelligence back channels for months in the Middle East, with sources reportedly having offered it to journalists for large sums of cash.

Tim Ramadan, a member of “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently,” a group of anti-Islamic State journalists and activists operating clandestinely in territories held by the terror group, told the British newspaper The Guardian on Thursday that a proliferation of administrative Islamic State documents has been published online over the past two years after the recapture of territory once held by the terror group.

“The unfortunate reality is that I know people who forged documents and presented them as real and even received asylum as a consequence,” Mr. Ramadan said.

Potential ’gold mine’

Sky News reported that the memory stick had been stolen from the head of Islamic State’s internal security police and that the man who stole it was a former Free Syrian Army convert to the terror group, who calls himself Abu Hamed.

Mr. Hamed told the news outlet he’d grown disillusioned with Islamic State’s leadership, which he claimed has been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Baath Party of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The documents showed how recruits would have to answer 23 questions on joining Islamic State — including their blood type, mother’s maiden name, “level of Shariah understanding” and previous experience.

Some of the names on the memory stick are fighters who have been already identified, such as Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a former rapper from west London who once posted an image of himself on Twitter holding a severed head.

Others include Junaid Hussain, a cyberoperative for Islamic State from the British city of Birmingham, and 21-year-old Reyaad Khan, who appeared in a recruitment video. Both were killed last year.

Leaks of such detail on Islamic State are rare, and the potential is real that this week’s trove of identifying information could help intelligence officials unmask extremists threatening more attacks like those that killed 130 people in Paris last November.

Richard Barrett, a former head of global counterterrorism at Britain’s MI6 Secret Intelligence Service, told Sky News that the cache “will be an absolute gold mine of information of enormous significance and interest to very many people, particularly the security and intelligence services.”

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.