‘ISIS fighters come from 70 countries’

Analysis of a windfall of data from inside Islamic State shows fighters of more than 70 nationalities joined the ruthless jihadist group, researchers said after examining thousands of records.

The treasure trove came from an ISIS defector who handed over some 11,000 personnel files to US television network NBC, although more than half were found to be duplicates.

NBC then passed 4,600 of the documents to the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), which is based at West Point but independent of the US military academy. The documents are one of several large-scale leaks from within ISIS this year.

Thousands of apparent ISIS 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 by comparing the documents it received from NBC against similar IS personnel records maintained by the US defence department, it was able to corroborate “approximately 98 per cent” of them.