PARIS // Fighters from more than 70 nationalities joined the ruthless extremist group ISIL, researchers said after examining thousands of records from a treasure trove of data that came from a defector.
Some 11,000 personnel files were handed over to US television network NBC, but further analysis showed that more than half were duplicates.
NBC then passed 4,600 of the documents to the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), which is independent from the US military academy.
The documents are one of several large-scale leaks from within ISIL this year.
Thousands of apparent ISIL registration documents were leaked in January to a Syrian opposition news website and in March the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and German broadcasters said they had obtained similar records. German security services also had access to that material.
The CTC said that by comparing the documents received from NBC against similar ISIL personnel records maintained by the US defence department, it was able to corroborate “approximately 98 per cent” of them.
The forms, completed by recruits in Arabic and often including notes from the assessors, refer to around 30 per cent of the estimated 15,000 new recruits who entered Syria during 2013 and 2014.
The analysis provided not only a composite picture of the fighters but also an insight into how ISIL is “attempting to vet new members, manage talent effectively ... and deal with a diverse pool of recruits”, said the report.
The recruits were between the ages of 12 to nearly 70, although the average age was 26 or 27.
Only 400 were under 18 upon entering the self-declared ISIL “caliphate”.
Thirty per cent said they were married, while 61 per cent were single, with another eight per cent unknown.
Some 1,371 said they had finished high school while 1,028 said they had attended university.
“The group seems overall to be generally well-educated, especially when compared to United Nations data on the average years of schooling in the countries in the dataset,” the report said.
More sinister were exit forms noting: “Go back to Libya and organise the way for the State”; “A task” and “Omar Al Shishani charged him with a job in Turkey”.
Shishani, or Omar the Chechen, who was effectively ISIL’s defence minister, was killed last month.
One line on the entry form is left blank, initially at least: Date and place of death.
The report came as Iraqi police on Tuesday unearthed two mass graves in the western city of Ramadi, with bodies of about 40 people killed by ISILmilitants during the militant group’s reign of terror in the city.
Officials said said ISIL militants who were captured and arrested after Iraqi forces routed the extremists from the Anbar provincial capital led authorities to the site of the mass graves, inside the city’s soccer stadium.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr on Wednesday called on the United Nations and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to help find a solution to the country’s simmering political crisis.
“We call upon the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the United Nations to interfere to get the Iraqi people out of their ordeal and to correct the political process even through holding early elections,” Mr Al Sadr said in a handwritten statement issued online.
He also called for renewed protests demanding that parliament approves a long-delayed new cabinet and end political and sectarian wrangling that is hampering a vote on the matter.
It came a day after lawmakers failed to hold a session to vote on whether to keep or oust the parliament speaker, Salim Al Jabouri, threatening to prolong Iraq’s paralysing political crisis amid the fight against ISIL which controls key areas in country’s north and west.
* Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and Reuters
