A leaked internal Islamic State
manual shows how the terrorist group has set about building a state in
Iraq and Syria complete with government departments, a treasury and an
economic programme for self-sufficiency, the Guardian can reveal.
The 24-page document, obtained by the Guardian, sets out a blueprint
for establishing foreign relations, a fully fledged propaganda
operation, and centralised control over oil, gas and the other vital
parts of the economy.
The manual, written last year and entitled Principles in the
administration of the Islamic State, lays bare Isis’s state-building
aspirations and the ways in which it has managed to set itself apart as
the richest and most destabilising jihadi group of the past 50 years.
Together with other documents obtained by the Guardian, it builds up a
picture of a group that, although sworn to a founding principle of
brutal violence, is equally set on more mundane matters such as health,
education, commerce, communications and jobs. In short, it is building a
state.
As western aircraft step up their aerial war on Isis targets in Syria,
the implication is that the military task is not simply one of
battlefield arithmetic. Isis is already far more than the sum of its
fighters.
The document – written as a foundation text to train “cadres of
administrators” in the months after Isis’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
declared a “caliphate” in Iraq
and Syria on 28 June 2014 – sketches out how to organise government
departments including education, natural resources, industry, foreign
relations, public relations and military camps.
Dated some time between July and October 2014, it details how Isis
will build separate training camps for regular troops and veterans
fighters. Veterans, it says, should go on a fortnight’s refresher course
each year to receive instruction in the “latest arts of using weapons,
military planning and military technologies”.
It says they will also be given a “detailed commentary on the
technologies” of the enemy and “how the soldiers of the state can take
advantage of them”.
The statecraft manual recommends a department for administering the
military camps, a complex arrangement that, as described, goes well
beyond the capabilities of al-Qaida in Afghanistan during the time it
plotted the 9/11 attacks.
The
document reveals for the first time that Isis always intended to train
children in the arts of war. Isis propaganda from this year has clearly
shown children being drilled, and even made to shoot captives.
But the text, authored by an Egyptian called Abu Abdullah, is
explicit about the intention to do so from mid- to late 2014. Children,
it says, will be receive “training on bearing light arms” and
“outstanding individuals” will be “selected from them for security
portfolio assignments, including checkpoints, patrols”.
The text highlights the need for Isis to achieve a unified culture
encompassing foreigners and natives and sets out the need for
self-sufficiency by establishing its own independent “factories for
local military and food production” and creating “isolated safe zones”
for providing for local needs.
The document came from a businessman working within Isis via the academic researcher Aymenn al-Tamimi, who has worked over the past year to compile the most thorough log of Isis documents available to the public.
For safety reasons, the Guardian cannot reveal further information
about the businessman but he has leaked nearly 30 documents in all,
including a financial statement from one of Isis’s largest provinces.
Isis has suffered military setbacks in recent weeks, and some Sunni
Arabs from Raqqa have indicated that its statecraft might be better on
paper than it is in practice.
But Tamimi said the playbook, along with a further 300 Isis documents
he has obtained over the past year, showed that building a viable
country rooted in fundamentalist theology was the central aim. “[Isis]
is a project that strives to govern. It’s not just a case of their sole
end being endless battle.”
Gen Stanley McChrystal (retired), who led the military units that
helped destroy Isis’s predecessor organisation (ISI) in Iraq from 2006
to 2008, said: “If it is indeed genuine, it is fascinating and should be
read by everyone – particularly policymakers in the west.
“If the west sees Isis as an almost stereotypical band of psychopathic killers, we risk dramatically underestimating them.
“In the Principles in the administration of the Islamic State, you
see a focus on education (really indoctrination) beginning with children
but progressing through their ranks, a recognition that effective
governance is essential, thoughts on their use of technology to master
information (propaganda), and a willingness to learn from the mistakes
of earlier movements.
“Its not a big departure from the works of Mao, the practices of the
Viet Minh in Indochina, or other movements for whom high-profile actions
were really just the tip of a far more nuanced iceberg of organising
activity.
Charlie Winter, a senior researcher for Georgia State University who
has seen the document, said it demonstrated Isis’s high capacity for
premeditation.
“Far from being an army of irrational, bloodthirsty fanatics, IS
[Isis] is a deeply calculating political organisation with an extremely
complex, well-planned infrastructure behind it.”
Lt Gen Graeme Lamb, former head of UK special forces, said the playbook carried a warning for current military strategy.
Referring to sections of the statecraft text in which Isis repeatedly
claims it is the only true representatives of Sunni Arab Muslims in the
region, Lamb said it was all the more important to ensure wider Sunni leadership in the fight with Isis, or risk “fuelling this monster”.
“Seeing Daesh [Isis] and the caliphate as simply a target to be
systematically broken by forces other than Middle Eastern Sunnis … is to
fail to understand this fight.
“It must be led by the Sunni Arab leadership and its many tribes
across the region, with us in the west and the other religious factions
in the Middle East acting in support.
“It is not currently how we are shaping the present counter-Isis campaign, thereby setting ourselves up for potential failure.”
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