I'm just wondering how authentic this list and the disgruntled fighter are. Given that the top level of the Daesh hierarchy, is reputed to be mostly composed of ex Sadams air force intelligence types, this could be an intel misinformation op. The term
maskirovka comes to mind.
It did occur to me that this could be an attempt to spoof unfriendly intelligence agencies and waste their time and effort on chasing ghosts while real sleeper agents continue their planning/preparations unabated. Still, the arguments to justify why these are probably real have been rather well covered by most international new outlets, and so far they look like pretty robust arguments to me.
Perhaps I can try and tackle this from the angle of why this might not be
maskirovka. Word of caution, I'm not intelligence-trained, so do take what I say with a pinch of salt.
From what I gather from the link you kindly shared (really appreciate it) the four key principles of
maskirovka are Activity, Plausibility, Variety and Continuity. I will not elaborate on these principles for the sake of brevity; for those interested, I'd highly suggest that you read the article.
To me the, the sheer effort needed to generate 22,000 data points, some real and some false, is a MASSIVE undertaking, considering that you would not only have to falsify names, but other pieces of data i.e. country of origin, and it would have to be coherent, plausible.
In this specific case, I would expect Plausibility to be hard to maintain.
If anything, the more I think about it the more I feel that IS seldom operates with
maskirovka in mind. The principle of Activity, for example...I don't see reports of IS regularly using dummies to waste Coalition air strike efforts. The principle of Variety...it seems to me quite predictable to me what they would do. Mine captured cities, use suicide bombers and VBIEDs in opening phases of an attack for shock impact. And the principle of Continuity...well that is hard to assess given that IS has been at war since inception so there really isn't any examples of peacetime deception attempts to compare against.
To me, it is almost as if these ex-IqAF Intel guys embrace Clauswitz's view that deception plans are practically a distraction to the commander. At times, it feels as if IS is desperate to achieve its political goals of forming a state more than anything else. Of course, this opinion comes from my limited access to literature on ISIS; I am willing to stand corrected.
More interestingly to me, that a German news outlet has access to the documents implies to me that this data is worth sharing (
they've apparently shared several recruitment forms to The Guardian) - yet another indicator to me that it is probably real. I mean, if this is an attempt at misinformation, you'd want to curtail it's spread ASAP. Instead, the opposite seems to be true. There
must be some value to propagating this piece of information, whether it is the expected demoralisation of present Daesh fighters/supporters, or the deterrent effect on would-be recruits. Granted, this does not address a specific principle (could someone help me out here?), but it is strong evidence to me regarding the authenticity of the documents, regardless of how the Western press tries to sprinkle skepticism into their reporting.
