Pentagon hopes to unlock vital IS intel

The Pentagon is sending dozens of additional intelligence analysts to Iraq to pore over a trove of information that is expected to be recovered in the offensive to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State (IS), data that could offer new clues about possible terrorist attacks in Europe.

The analysts will have several immediate priorities: Share with the Iraqi military any information crucial to the unfolding fight in Mosul; pass along insights useful to US officials planning an attack on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in eastern Syria; hunt for clues about the location of the group’s shadowy leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; and search for any information about terrorist cells in Europe and any attacks they may be plotting.
Maj Gen Gary J Volesky, commander of US ground forces in Iraq, has called Mosul the Islamic State’s Iraqi “crown jewel.” Noting that the militants had been entrenched there for more than two years, he added last Wednesday, “Clearly, there’s going to be intelligence that will be able to be exploited.”

European intelligence and counterterrorism officials said they were eagerly awaiting data gleaned from computer hard drives, cellphones, recruiting files and other sources after Iraqi forces advance into the city in coming weeks. These officials fear an influx of foreign fighters fleeing the campaigns against Mosul and Raqqa.

Information recovered from two earlier military operations against the IS – one in eastern Syria in May 2015 and another from more recent combat in Manbij, Syria – gave US and allied officials trenchant insights into the IS leadership structure and its financing and recruiting.

Forces have also recovered detailed records of many of the 40,000 fighters from more than 120 countries who have poured into Syria and Iraq to fight for the group.

“If we get a phone off of a dead IS fighter in Manbij and it has a number of telephone numbers into a particular capital or city around the world, we share that information with the coalition members so that they can conduct their own investigation,” Brett H McGurk, US President Barack Obama’s envoy to the coalition fighting the IS, said this month. “This is now really starting to work at light speed, although we want to speed it up.”

It is unclear if IS leaders in Mosul will try to destroy any of their electronic or paper records before Iraqi forces and their US advisers can seize them. The IS maintains prodigious and meticulous records, and it is not known if the leaders would take such a drastic step.
Data is flowing out of Iraq and Syria as information-sharing within and between European governments has steadily improved since the deadly terrorism strikes in Paris and Brussels in the past year, European counterterrorism and law enforcement officials say. “A lot has changed since the attacks in Paris,” said Johan De Becker, the police chief of the western districts of Brussels, which include Molenbeek and others that were the home of the Paris and Brussels attackers. “We have made a lot of improvements on the level of national and international signalling concerning the foreign terrorist fighters.”

Daunting task
US officials acknowledge that they face a daunting task in gathering, analysing and disseminating to Iraqi and Western intelligence services a collection of information from Mosul that is expected to dwarf the 20 terabytes of data retrieved so far in Manbij. One terabyte is equal to the contents of a million books.

The Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defence Intelligence Agency have been providing intelligence support to the Iraqis for the past two years, US officials said, but there has not yet been a fight to match the size and scope of the battle to retake Mosul, where half of the city’s previous population of 2 million still resides.

The US-led coalition must be able to offer intelligence support in the Mosul operation to more partner forces – including the Iraqi army, counterterrorism service and police, as well as Kurdish peshmerga fighters – than in any previous operations to retake other cities.

As a result, in the military’s most recent deployment of more than 600 additional troops, dozens of military and civilian intelligence analysts were dispatched to several locations around Iraq. Most were in place just before the Mosul offensive began, but some are still trickling in.

“Whenever you liberate a city the size of Mosul, you can expect to get a tremendous amount of information,” said Col John L Dorrian, the chief US military spokesman in Baghdad. “Certainly, if we have a window of opportunity that presents itself rather quickly, we do have adequate forces in theatre to go ahead and act upon that.”

The intelligence surge would most likely “give us a lot of insight into IS networks not just in Iraq and Syria, but it also gives insight into how they export terror around the world, some of the people they work with, how they finance themselves,” Dorrian said.

That is important because even as the IS loses its physical caliphate, or religious state, in Iraq and Syria, it can still inflict deadly assaults, senior US counterterrorism officials say.