Germany: Files listing Islamic State fighters are authentic

BERLIN -- Thousands of files have surfaced with personal data on members of the Islamic State group -- documents that might help authorities track down and prosecute foreign fighters who returned home after joining the extremists or identify those who recruited them in the first place.

Germany's federal criminal police said Thursday they are in possession of the files and believe they are authentic.

The announcement came after Britain's Sky News reported it had obtained 22,000 Islamic State files that detail the real names of fighters for the group, where they were from, their telephone numbers and even names of those who sponsored and recruited them.

In a joint report, Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in Munich and broadcasters WDR and NDR reported independently Monday they had obtained "many dozens" of pages of such documents.

"This is a huge database -- there are more than something like 22,000 names, so this is very, very important," said Dalia Ghanem-Yazbeck, a research analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center.

She said the files "definitely" would help international security services, including those in Arab countries, confirm the identities of those who have left to fight for Islamic State, to discover the identities of new fighters and to help them identify those who return home from Syria and Iraq.

Sky said the files, obtained at the border between Turkey and Syria, were passed to them on a memory stick stolen from the head of the Islamic State's internal security police by a former fighter who had grown disillusioned with the group.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the German broadcasters reported they also had obtained the files on the Turkey-Syria border, where they said Islamic State files and videos were widely available from anti-IS Kurdish fighters and members of IS itself.

The documents highlight the bureaucratic work of the highly secretive extremist group that has spread fear through its brutal killings and deadly attacks in its self-declared caliphate of Syria and Iraq, as well as in places such as France, Turkey, Lebanon, Yemen and Libya.

The information could help the U.S.-led coalition that is fighting the Islamic State group by aiding in a crackdown on the extremists' foreign fighter networks, said U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for the coalition.

He said while he was not able to verify the documents, he hoped "if there is a media outlet that has these names and numbers, I hope they publish them."

That would help bring attention to the problem of foreign fighters joining IS and also would help authorities crack down on the problem, he said.

"This would allow the law-enforcement apparatus across the world to become much more engaged and begin to help do what we can to stem this flow of foreign fighters -- so we're hopeful that it's accurate, and if so, we certainly plan to do everything we can to help," he said.

Sky and Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported the documents were forms with 23 questions to be filled out by recruits when they were inducted into the Islamic State.

Sky said they included nationals from at least 51 countries, including the U.S. and Britain.

Zaman al-Wasl English, a Syrian news site critical of extremist fighters and the government, also obtained the documents from a source in the border area, said its editor, Mohamed Hamdan.

The site had only 1,736 names, however, and Hamdan couldn't explain the discrepancy.

"The document gives the jihadists who want to join Daesh the choice of profession -- what does he want to be? A suicide bomber, a martyr, a fighter or an administrative worker? And many of the people who join the Islamic State as administrative workers have degrees in engineering, computers and many strong majors," Hamdan said in Tunis.

The documents it posted had the word "secret" at the bottom, while on the top it had the name "Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant," or ISIL, on one top corner and the "General Directorate of Borders" on the other. Hamdan said they were the same as those obtained by Sky.

The website's documents stated the fighters entered areas under IS control in 2013, except for a Turkish citizen born in 1989 who entered May 12, 2014.

The documents also state which border point the fighter crossed, whom from his family IS should contact, his personal belongings, blood type and marital status.

It posted 122 documents of fighters from around the world who said they wanted to carry out suicide attacks.

As of last month, the U.S. estimates IS had 19,000 to 25,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, down from an estimated 20,000 to 31,500 fighters -- a number that was based on intelligence reports from May to August 2014.

The decrease reflects the combined effects of battlefield deaths, desertions, internal disciplinary action, recruiting shortfalls and difficulties foreign fighters face traveling to Syria, according to a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the estimates with the media.