BERLIN — Thousands of files have surfaced with personal data on members of the Islamic State — documents that either might help authorities track down and prosecute foreign fighters who returned home after joining the terrorist group or might help 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 itself.
“This is a huge data base — 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 would “definitely” help international security services, including those in Arab countries, to confirm the identities of those who have already left to fight for Islamic State, to discover the identities of new fighters, and to help them in identifying 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 terrorist 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-Islamic State Kurdish fighters and members of the group itself.
