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Internal ISIS Documents Reveal the Terrorist Group Is Under Stress

ISIS fighters
Islamic State fighters / AP
August 30, 2016

Internal Islamic State documents show the terrorist group is suffering internal chaos amid bureaucratic infighting, failed counterintelligence operations, and embezzlement, the Daily Beast reported Tuesday.

The documents, seized by a Syrian rebel group near Damascus, illustrate a terrorist group mired in red tape as ISIS leaders attempt to impose regulations on nearly every facet of daily life in seized territories, ranging from the requisition of weapons to the allowance of vacation time.

Maher al-Hamdan, media spokesman for the Ahmad Abdo Brigade, a U.S.-backed Syrian rebel group, told the Daily Beast the documents were captured from a slain ISIS military commander who was killed in a June battle between Ahmad Abdo insurgents and the jihadists.

The Daily Beast reported:

The documents are mainly bits of correspondence between other ISIS officials and are embarrassing to a messianic movement that proclaims it is growing in strength and expanding its dominions in spite of nearly three years of attritional warfare and battlefield losses across Iraq and Syria.

One unsigned letter addressed to the so-called governor of ISIS’s Damascus province dated May 10, 2016, reports the failure of a counterintelligence operation launched against the Ahmad Abdo Brigade in the city of Dumayr, located nearly 25 miles from Damascus.

The commander tasked with leading the operation was a double agent who "gathered all the [ISIS] military leaders inside the area for the pretext of the military and security work against the [Ahmad Abdo Brigade], while at the same time he was coordinating secretly with the [Ahmad Abdo Brigade] in order to assassinate all leaders with mines/explosive devices that he was placing in the meeting place," the letter reads.

Though the operation was never completed, ISIS’s general security officer in the Damascus province disrupted the militant group’s finances and logistics to the remaining security officers in the area.

The Daily Beast called the counterintelligence failure "noteworthy" given the earlier importance of tradecraft to ISIS’s battlefield strategy, which included sleeper cells and spy networks. These capabilities were key to ISIS’s ability to capture large amounts of territory during a period of time in 2013 and 2014.

Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a Syrian researcher who forensically analyzes leaked ISIS documents, told the Daily Beast the newly released document "give important insight into ISIS’s ‘security ops’ in undermining rival factions in the south and reveal a good deal of internal trouble in the ranks."