It was precisely at 6.08pm on June 23rd 2015 when Air France flight 1591 from Istanbul docked at passenger terminal 2E at Paris airport Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle. For some 20 minutes, three agents of the French internal intelligence service, the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure (DGSI), had been posted inside the terminal building, waiting to arrest “Abou Saïf the Korean” – real name Nicolas Moreau. He was one more French jihadist among about 200 who had by then already returned from the fighting in Syria.
Moreau was intercepted by the agents as he stepped off the aircraft. The items he was carrying illustrated the contradictions of this umpteenth French national to be lost to the jihadist cause; an Adidas bag, a Marlboro Classics jacket, a carton of L&M cigarettes and a keffiyeh and a qamis, the traditional Afghan headdress and tunic.
Three months before his arrest, a report by a French Senate commission of inquiry into the organization of jihadist networks, and the means with which to counter them, could have been written with Moreau in mind. “Some French jihadists, whose backgrounds are often chaotic and who consider themselves disinherited, would be particularly drawn to the rhetoric [editor’s note: of the Islamic State group] founded on humiliation, in which they can perceive an echo of their personal situation,” said the report. “[…] To those who are above all driven by the wish to see their usefulness recognised and appreciated – among who are notably individuals with no ties – Daech [another name, taken from an Arabic acronym, for Islamic State group which is commonly used in France] promises the membership of a community of combatants united by the complimentarity of their respective roles.”
Nicolas Moreau was adopted from an orphanage in South Korea at the age of four by a French couple from Nantes. After growing up in the north-west French town, he trained to become a deep-sea fisherman, but that was cut short after stints of several years in prison for convictions of theft and violence. It was in prison that he converted to Islam. He subsequently joined the ranks of the Islamic State group, in which he spent a year and a half, when he adopted the pseudonym of “Abou Saïf the Korean”, and became involved in combat in Iraq.
During his trial which opened in December 2016, Moreau spoke of his taste for the works of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, mixing this with his claim to being an “insubordinate”, and also pronouncing both his belief that “I can still change my lifestyle” with the threat that “I’ll go back to arms” if handed a lengthy prison sentence. In his summing up, a magistrate from the anti-terrorist section of the Paris public prosecutor’s office spoke of Moreau’s “logorrhoea stamped with a narcissistic delirium” and sketched the portrait of a person he said was “full of himself”.
When Moreau was arrested in the early evening of June 23rd 2015, the DGSI agent who placed the handcuffs on him was unaware that he was about to discover one of the best-kept secrets of the Islamic State group.
The intelligence officer, Grégory D (last name withheld), was experienced in anti-jihadist operations. In 2010 he was involved in dismantling a network that sent jihadists to join other mujahedeen in the Pakistan-Afghan border zones. In the weeks before that, the officer had taken part in investigating a jihadist group in the small town of Lunel, in southern France. He had also been involved with the phone surveillance of Hayat Boumeddiene, the widow of Amédy Coulibaly, the gunman who attacked the Hyper-Cacher kosher supermarket in south-east Paris in January 2015, shooting dead four hostages before being killed when police stormed the building.
But nothing had prepared Grégory D for what he was about to learn from “Abou Saïf the Korean”. When Moreau was first taken into custody for questioning, he refused to leave his cell, protesting at the food he was served and the fact that he was not given permission to smoke. He said he would not reply to the questions put to him by those he later called, in a letter to the magistrate in charge of the judicial investigation into his case, “DGSI morons”. Seven hours after being placed in custody, when he had finally accepted to sit down in front of the intelligence officer, Moreau gave an astonishing piece of information, referring to the “internal security” branch of IS, the Amniyat.
According to Moreau’s statement, the Islamic State (IS) unit was made up of about 1,500 people, , whose mission was “to detect spies in Iraq and Syria” and also “to send people everywhere in the world to carry out violent action, to kill and also recruit youngsters, to bring back cameras, chemical products”. He gave precise information about a member of the Amniyat. That paerson, it would transpire, was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the coordinator of the November 13th 2015 attacks in and around Paris which left 130 people dead, 90 of them gunned down at the Bataclan music hall. At the end of his second statement, Moreau declared: “I have information to prevent attacks in Belgium and in France.”
But there were doubts about his revelations. Under questioning by the DGSI, Moreau had explained that for three months he had managed a restaurant specialised in Moroccan cuisine in the Syrian city of Raqqa, paying the equivalent of two euros per month to Islamic State for electricity. The restaurant, Chez Abou Sayf, was situated close to the Raqqa lawcourts and was, he explained, popular with numerous jihadists, including members of the Amniyat.
While the existence of the restaurant proved to be true, the police and investigating magistrates were sceptical of his account. Moreau’s last known position with IS was that of a policeman in Raqqa. “It was a nice experience for me given that in France I was always chased after by the police,” he told his French interrogators. “There, things were reversed.” But the DGSI wondered whether he might have been in fact a member of the IS secret service, sent to Europe to carry out a terrorist attack.
A DGSI officer subsequently wrote a summary report, entitled “information on AMNI”, AMNI being another name for Amniyat. One month after recording Moreau’s statements, the DGSI report said: “Since the creation of the caliphate, and more still since the beginning of the strikes led by the international coalition, the Islamic State equipped itself with entities tasked with guaranteeing the security and control of its territories. Among these structures is AMNI […] The existence and reinforcement of AMNI appears to constitute a priority for the Islamic State.” According to the DGSI report, AMNI’s prerogatives included “the detention and execution of hostages, the carrying out of sentences resulting from the application of the sharia [canonical law based on the teachings of the Koran], and the detection of any attempt at infiltration”.
Five months after that report was redacted, US website The Daily Beast published a series of articles which detailed more about the IS security service, based on the account of a former member of Amniyat, in which he detailed its four branches. According to the IS defector, one of these was Amn Al-Dakhili, which acted as an interior ministry tasked with upholding public order in each town and city. Military intelligence was the role given to another branch called Amn Al-Askari, while counter intelligence was the role of yet another branch called Amn Al-Dawla. Clandestine operations outside of the territories controlled by the caliphate were the task of Amn Al-Kharji. These two latter branches correspond precisely to the division of interior and exterior roles shared by the FBI and CIA in the US, to that divided up between MI5 and MI6 in Britain, the DGSI and DGSE in France, and between the Shin Bet and Mossad in Israel.
'Not just warmaking, but also a structure and organization'
Islamic terrorists are often caricatured, with a touch of condescendence, as uneducated barbarians, as if the 9/11 attacks in the US were carried out by a barefoot gang and masterminded by leaders hidden in a grotto, or that the November 13th 2015 attacks in Paris were the act of crazed beasts. That is to forget a more sophisticated reality, and that since their very origins, terrorist organizations have adopted counter-espionage methods in order to avoid the traps of those that they oppose and against who they intend to strike out at. The simplistic caricature obscures the operational intelligence that they employ at our cost.
Terrorist attacks are but the tip of the iceberg, the most bloody and macabre evidence of a battle that is played out in the shadows between, on the one hand, the intelligence services of the West and Middle East, and on the other that of the IS. It is a secret battle that is comparable to that of the manipulative operations of the Cold War.
There is no question here of creating a myth that jihadists are some sort of James Bond-type terrorist operatives. Some of their practices are rudimentary. Some of their operatives suffer from elocution problems, and limited intellectual capacities. But if Europe has for almost three years been the target of a wave of terrorist attacks, during which France has seen about 250 innocent people killed inside its borders, it is not only because our security services are structurally disorganized and unable to address the current challenge posed by the scale of the jihadist phenomenon.
During an investigation lasting eight months, Mediapart has had access to the files of around 20 judicial cases, which include almost 59,000 statements (not all of which were studied). It has consulted hundreds of transcripts of phone taps and of questioning of suspects, of police investigation reports, of intelligence documents – both classified and non-classified. Many of the quotes that appear in this article, where the identity of those cited is withheld, come from these. Mediapart has sought the reaction of intelligence officers, magistrates, lawyers, researchers, former hostages and former jihadists (the latter also cited anonymously) to the information that emerged from the documents. Finally, Mediapart has also attended the trials in France of several jihadists after their return from the warzone in Syria. References to all the sources of information that this article is based upon can be found in the "Boîte Noir" section at the bottom of this page.
Our investigation into the workings of the IS secret services, the most structured of any terrorist organization, reveals how they counter infiltrators among their ranks in Syria, how their undercover operatives deceive European security agencies, and how their counter-espionage methods are inspired by those of agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, France’s DGSI and even the former KGB.
Ever since extracts of Nicolas Moreau’s statement detailing the existence of the Amniyat was leaked to the media, others have also referred to the IS section. Several jihadists returning to France from the Middle East have claimed to have run into trouble with the Amniyat, but their accounts have been too vague to offer a precise picture of the organization. During their interrogations, one spoke of an intelligence gathering agency that “over there they call AMNI”, while another alluded to “Emnins, meaning a secret police of hooded people”, but little more detail emerged.
Others, meanwhile, appeared to confuse the Amniyat with the al-Hisba religious police in charge of ensuring the application of sharia law. One woman who had been married to three jihadists described in her statement how “in Manbij, there was the Islamic police, the military and Hisba, I couldn’t tell the difference”. According to her account, the Hisba “patrolled in white cars with a microphone and […] batons”. Some accounts suggested that the Hisba were a part of the Amniyat, others suggested they were not.
With the maze of its administration, the complexity of its organization chart and its hierarchical planning, there is something Kafkaesque about the IS group. “There is not just the war, there is also a structure and an organization,” commented the Swedish jihadist Osama Krayem, suspected of being involved in the 2016 Brussels bombings. Karim Mohamed-Aggad, the brother of one of the gunmen who attacked the Bataclan music hall in Paris in November 2015, said that where he was involved in the fighting in Syria there were “about 20 emirs and sub-emirs”. In a DGSI report, it was noted that , “like most of the administrations under Islamic State, AMNI [another name for the Amniyat] depends upon a decentralised organization”. German jihadist Nils Donath, arrested on his return from IS ranks in Syria in January 2015, told interrogators: “Internal security exists in parallel to the military and administrative organization of ‘the State’.”
In a major investigation, German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel published the contents of documents belonging to Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, better known by his nom de guerre of Haji Bakr, a former Iraqi intelligence officer during the regime of Saddam Hussein who became what Der Spiegel called “the architect” of the IS group before he was killed in January 2014. The handwritten documents detailed what Der Spiegel called “the source code of the most successful terrorist army in recent history”.
“It was not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an "Islamic Intelligence State" - a caliphate run by an organization that resembled East Germany's notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency,” reported the German magazine. The papers even detailed operations to infiltrate villages, setting out who should monitor who, and a system whereby there was an emir appointed to monitor other emirs "in case”, wrote Bakr, “they don't do their jobs well”.
Der Spiegel saw in this professional jihadist intelligence organization the influence of Saddam Hussein’s military. The Islamic State group would appear, contrary to its name, more a political structure than a religious one. Recent and documented research contradicts this theory (see one example here), suggesting that high-profile IS figures who some argue provide the proof of the influence of the former Iraqi dictatorship are in fact longtime Islamists.
Mediapart has found no factual evidence to settle this debate on the origins of Amniyat. But one thing is certain; terrorists claiming to carry out their deeds in the name of Islam had not waited for the help of officers of the former Hussein regime. Since 40 years ago, they have acquired knowledge in the fundamentals of counter-espionage, a knowledge drawn from Western secret services.
Teaching terror and espionage
A part of the story of modern jihadist activity, as far as we know it, was played out in a photocopy store in the suburbs of Fort Bragg in North Carolina. That was where Ali Mohamed, the ‘father’ of jihadist counter-espionage, copied off manuals from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School where he was stationed as a member of the US army.
Born in 1952, Ali Mohamed initially became a major in the Egyptian army, in charge of clandestine operations and the protection of diplomats. But he was also secretly close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who helped found the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group and who would become leader of al-Qaeda following the killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. After Ali Mohamed was hired as a counter-terrorist expert for the airline EgyptAir, Zawahiri gave him the mission of infiltrating US intelligence. He approached the CIA and was sent to Germanyby the agency to infiltrate a mosque in the city of Hamburg. But the CIA discovered Mohamed had alerted the imam to his undercover role, which put an end to his services.
Although he was supposedly banned from entering the US, Mohamed succeeded in boarding a flight to America, when he began a romance with a Californian woman he met onboard. The pair married in the US six weeks later, and after a year in the country he managed to sign up with the US army. His excellent fitness and performance at demanding sports led him to be assigned to a special forces group in Fort Bragg. Because of his knowledge of Islam and the Arab world, he was even subsequently given the task of leading about 40 teaching courses to special forces groups sent on missions to the Middle East. For that, he was provided with access to a large amount of documentation.
In 1988, Mohamed informed his superiors that he wanted to use his leave time to fight the Russian army present in Afghanistan. In reality, once there he trained the first volunteers to join Osama Bin Laden’s group, teaching them unconventional war techniques he had learned in Fort Bragg. In the 1990s he unsuccessfully applied to work as a translator for the FBI.
Meanwhile, for ten years up until his arrest in 1998, Mohamed continued to train al-Qaeda members, including in espionage techniques and even how to hi-jack commercial aircraft. For these courses, which were attended by Bin Laden himself alongside senior al-Qaeda figures, he used Fort Bragg manuals he had copied off. A former mujahidin, (whose identity is withheld here) who had attended training courses in the organisation’s camp at Al Farouq in Afghanistan, close to Kandahar, told Mediapart: “The basic training lasted two months. A second course, more perfecting, was dedicated to urban guerrilla warfare. Those who took part followed modules, how to throw off a tail, how to tail someone and so on. And then, in your daily life at the camp, everyone had to be distrustful of everyone. During conversations, you didn’t give your true identity, only your kunya [Arabic nom de guerre]. We had to lie about our nationality. For example, if you were French you said you were Belgian.”
Another Islamist who had attended the training in Afghanistan said there were “courses on security given to recruits at the Al Farouq camp with evaluations at the end of each course – ‘basic’, ‘average’, ‘expert’,” adding: “The best ones were then oriented, after a personal interview, towards more developed courses corresponding to their wishes and the needs of the group.”
Ali Mohamed’s lessons served to help al-Qaeda establish a counter-espionage branch in 1998. “We were then to have daily reports on the activities of each camp,” wrote Nasser al-Bahri, a former bodyguard for Bin Laden, in a book first published in French in 2010. “We also had to collect the maximum amount of information on all the members [...] Fifty brothers selected on their aptitude for intelligence followed a training course [...]. They are then placed in different sectors, to inform us about what was happening there.”
The consequences for those who were suspected of betrayal were fatal. “The security measures were drastic and the punishment for those who didn’t abide by them was drastic,” recalled the former mujahidin cited above. “Before we arrived at the camp, a man described as being a spy had been executed. They put him on a hillside and then fired at him with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.” He said that in the autumn of 1998, notices were posted on buildings used by al-Qaeda warning its members “not to talk about our activities, and to jihadists to be wary of people close to them”.
Al-Qaeda had learned to its cost that its members were to be distrustful of everyone, including their own family. In the middle of the 1990s, the Egyptian intelligence services captured two 13-year-old boys, one of them the son of an al-Qaeda treasurer, the other the son of a leading member of the organisation. The boys were drugged and sodomised, when photos were taken. Faced with the threat that the pictures would be sent to their families, the boys were forced to plant microphones inside their homes. They were also given two bombs with which to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri. But the plot was discovered and Zawahiri decided the children should be tried by a sharia court.
Several al-Qaeda members opposed the move, arguing that to try children went against the rules of Islam. Zawahiri waved away the objections and the two boys were convicted of betrayal and sodomy. Their confessions and subsequent executions were filmed and copies were distributed as a warning to others of the consequences of betrayal. Subsequently, al-Qaeda manuals on espionage and counter espionage justified the act of eliminating “the spies of the depraved crusaders”, which also applied to Muslim spies.
Ali Mohamed also left his mark in the manuals. After supplying al-Qaeda’s Afghan camps with documentation stolen from Fort Bragg and miniaturised (the reformed Mujahidin cited earlier told Mediapart that “I still remember the FBI handbooks, we wondered how they got hold of them”), Mohamed also used the documents to write up a 180-page terrorist instruction manual for al-Qaeda, entitled “Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants”. It contained diverse chapters dealing with security, espionage and forgery techniques. This new guide to methods of Islamic terrorism joined other reading inside the camps, including The Revolt: Story of the Irgun by Menachem Begin, the late former Israeli prime minister and a leader of the Zionist paramilitary organization Irgun which carried out terrorist attacks, and also works by Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and 6th-century Chinese general and military strategist Sun-Tzu.
The paranoia reigning in Raqqa
Several senior al-Qaeda figures subsequently produced their own works on the specific theme of security. And when one considers that it took the Americans ten years to hunt down and kill Osama Bin Laden, the most wanted terrorist on the planet, the lessons seem to have hit home.
“Over the years the jihadist organisations refine their knowledge. They get feedback from experience which they publish on the internet,” says Kevin Jackson, director of research at the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism (CAT), who has written a series of articles on his blog about the security measures adopted by terrorist groups (see here, here and here). “So there's a know-how that's passed from group to group, from generation to generation. In itself Islamic State's internal security is nothing new, the al-Shabab in Somalia already had a service which was called the Amniyat – Amni means 'security' in Arabic. What is new, on the other hand, is the ever greater preponderance given to such a structure inside a terrorist organization.”
Enlargement : Illustration 4
The war against spies is now the “mother of all battles, the most ferocious, the most dangerous, the most difficult”, wrote Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current head of al-Qaeda, in the introduction to a work republished on the internet in July 2009, after a section of al-Qaeda's leaders were wiped out by American drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal areas. Six years later the Islamic State was to suffer the same fate and the group tried to adopt the same solutions.
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On September 8th 2014, Foued Mohamed-Aggad was waiting with a friend at a bakery in Raqqa when a missile landed on the store. The jihadist from the Alsace region of north-east France was knocked out but regained consciousness and was largely unharmed, though the building that housed the bakery was itself flattened and 53 people were left dead. Mohamed-Aggad found his friend in the wreckage and he was also unhurt. The pair headed for their pick-up which was itself then targeted by a missile. The force of the blast threw them to the ground but Mohamed-Aggad suffered only slight injuries to his elbows. The French intelligence services had just learnt that the Frenchman had been put in charge of a katiba, or brigade, of 300 fighters. He now judged it a good time to go on the run. The rumours of his death on the Iraqi battlefront were still circulating months later, until his trail was finally picked up again on November 13th 2015, when he was found to be one of the attackers at the Bataclan in Paris.
In the space of four months in 2015 several senior figures in IS – from the person in charge of oil and gas for the group, Abu Sayyaf, to the organisation's number two Haji Mutazz – were successfully targeted by aerial attacks or ground raids. What IS leaders fear most of all – as do al-Qaeda leaders – is being the victim of a drone attack. A surgical strike carried out by a drone denies the victim the chance to die with weapon in hand, thus putting at risk the status they most prize, that of dying as a martyr.
The avalanche of targeted bombs created real paranoia and unleashed a massive hunt for potential moles on IS soil. Speaking about a prisoner who had been particularly badly tortured, the former Danish hostage, Daniel Rye Ottosen, later told his country's secret services during a debriefing: “They questioned him for a long time because they wanted him to admit that he was a spy who had simply come to place 'trackers' so that the town could be bombed.”
No one was above suspicion. “[My husband] told me that some women placed microchips in places where brothers in combat were to be found so that they could be bombed,” said the wife of French jihadist Salim Benghalem, the man suspected of being the ringleader of the November 13th 2015 attacks in Paris and who had travelled to Syria. At the home of one of her friends back in France investigators found a reminder of the precautions that were to be taken to ensure that traitors did not place “small electronic spying devices” in car parks to help targeted air strikes. IS advice was that its members spread “as widely as possible”. The woman on whose computer the advice was found lived in the Val-de-Marne département (or county) south-east of Paris.
When he arrived in the IS Syrian stronghold of Raqqa, Réda Hame, who had been recruited by the group to carry out an attack in France, was ordered to close the blinds in the place in which he was staying. “They explained to us that there were traitors who placed microchips in buildings to guide missiles, and that you therefore should not look outside,” said Hame, who was arrested in France in August 2015. “They told us that a building with new arrivals had been bombed, leaving 70 people dead inside...”
As a result of this, IS “reinforced its internal security measures considerably” in the first quarter of 2015, according to the French external intelligence agency, the DGSE. Speaking to a parliamentary commission of inquiry, the director of military intelligence, General Christophe Gomart, described how the streets of Raqqa were covered with “strips of fabric which stopped our satellites and reconnaissance planes from seeing what was happening below”. This was, he said, proof of a certain mastery of “concealment techniques” in relation to the capturing of images. Another senior anti-terrorist official, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “Their black tarpaulins complicated the job for us but they couldn't stop a thermal camera.”
The jihadist secret service agents were in the front line when it came to security and imposed strict “secrecy measures” on themselves, with all mobile phones banned. When the Belgian Mohamed Abrini went to Syria to visit Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was preparing the November 2015 Paris attacks from his base in Raqqa, the latter spent just one day with his childhood friend. “He mistrusted everyone,” Abrini later said. “I'd come with my GSM [phone] and he was afraid he'd be attacked by a drone.”
Other soldiers of the so-called caliphate got rid of the GPS antenna in their mobile phones. “The satellite packages were [also] removed and banned in locations containing Islamic State members,” said Lotfi, a telecommunications engineer who worked for the terrorist organisation. The French internal intelligence agency, the DGSI, says that jihadists in Raqqa had to use “cyber cafés where everything is controlled”.
The Swedish jihadist Osama Krayem, suspected of involvement in the Paris attacks of November 2015, has spoken about the toughening of security measures inside IS territory. He says it was impossible to enter an area where the group's top figures were based because “half of the people in Raqqa are informers”.
The prison under the Raqqa football stadium
The whole security apparatus was enrolled to deal with the suspected growth in the number of spies on the streets. A French national who admitted being part of the Islamic police later gave evidence to investigators about their daily street patrols. “I started work at 9am. Around 9.30am we set off on our rounds. There were five of us in [our car]. Each of us had a Glock [automatic pistol] and an AK. The rifles stayed in the vehicle at the end of our duty but we kept the pistol with us. We carried out checks on suspect people, especially when they had large suitcases,” he said.
According to a DGSE memo, IS focussed its efforts in particular on its “intelligence activities in order to keep a better eye on its members and to protect attempts at infiltration from outside”. The Amniyat was closely involved in this. “Its first goal [is apparently] to protect the caliphate's leadership and sensitive infrastructure from the international coalition's strikes and from enemy infiltration,” says France's domestic intelligence agency the DGSI.
According to the agency “secret agents”, dressed in civilian clothes with their beard shaved off and smoking a cigarette so as to “not attract attention”, were dispersed through the most populous areas. The slightest suspicion could lead to an arrest. This happened to a fighter who went to the market on his moped without permission, and to another who, during the course of a discussion, showed too detailed knowledge of military information.
Sometimes ordinary civilians helped the Amniyat agents. One Iraqi surgeon denounced her own husband. “She denounced him to Daesh, saying that he was against them and they cut off his head,” according to the later testimony of a French woman who had become disillusioned after three successive marriages with jihadists. There was also the Swiss national who styled himself 'Abu Mahdi al-Swissry' who had the misfortune to show a fellow fighter the two walkie-talkies he had brought with him from Europe but whose presence in his luggage he had not previously disclosed. Someone immediately pinned him to the ground. “Some secret service people arrived,” said the Frenchwoman. The agents then removed the man's shoes and socks, looking for any microchips that might be hidden there. Karim, the brother of Paris attacker Foued Mohamed-Aggad, has provided his own take on life inside Islamic State. “It's not Club Dorothée over there,” he said, referring to a popular children's programme on French television in the 1980s and 1990s. “There are traitors, everyone suspects everyone.”
The telecommunications engineer Lotfi himself fell foul of the paranoia and once found himself suspended from the ceiling by a chain wrapped around his wrists, his arms behind his back. Around ten hooded individuals took it in turns to hit him, promising that he would be executed next and giving him electric shocks. This was despite the fact that he had been a loyal worker in the self-styled state for more than a year. His 'crime'? Lotfi, thinking he was doing the right thing, had re-established the GSM network during a clash between IS fighters and the Syrian army at Raqqa. “The IS leaders hadn't been advised that the network had been put back on and during the fighting they'd noticed that Bashar [al-Assad's] soldiers had used it to call up reinforcements. So I was accused of being a French spy.”
The French engineer says the situation was made even worse for him because the head of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had taken part in the fighting and been wounded. After eight months in the hands of the Amniyat, Lotfi was set free. The telecommunications specialist thought this was a trap, “A way for them to discover my potential accomplices”.
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When they are not mingling anonymously in crowds, the Amniyat agents wear balaclavas and carry white plastic cards with their photo and identity and a stamp from the IS administration with the words 'special forces' written in Arabic. That is how they are dressed when they take their suspects to the local stadium in Raqqa.
In the Syrian city of Aleppo the Amniyat's prison was in the cellars of the eye hospital, while in Taqba, west of Raqqa, it is in a tall tower at the entrance to the town. In Raqqa, however, the prison is located in the bowels of a football stadium. The space is large enough to house the headquarters of the “military, Islamic and secret police” plus their prisoners, according to one witness. This witness, an IT consultant who quickly became disillusioned with life there, said the prisoners were a varied group. “There were all sorts. A doctor had been accused of having too much money[...] some people had been accused of taking drugs. And there were lots of people who didn't know why they were there,” he recalled.
The former weights room served as a communal room for all prisoners while the changing rooms were individual cells for the most dangerous or most sensitive detainees. The jihadists showed a certain degree of ingenuity when it came to housing prisoners. For example, when they had to imprison a number of hostages at Sheikh Najjar, an industrial city just north of Aleppo, some French members of the IS security services summoned local builders to put up some partitions in a furniture factory, before themselves making and putting in reinforced doors, going so far as to create a secure air-locked entrance into the cellar.
Prisoners transported even the shortest of distances inside the Raqqa stadium were always blindfolded and the interrogations were carried out by men in balaclavas. Foreign prisoners were asked about the reason for their presence on IS territory and they were compelled to tell what they knew. The Amniyat employed a very effective technique for flushing out moles.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse and Michael Streeter