Why We Collected ISIS’ Internal Documents, and What Happens Next

These documents were abandoned, left to the elements, scattered on the ground, and in some cases were being burned. Our aim was to preserve and protect the documents to ensure that the public would have the chance to understand ISIS from inside ISIS. In each case, the documents were taken from a battlefield where the only governing authority was the military.

From the moment we preserved these documents we recognized their historic value. Before we published anything, we assigned a team in the newsroom to find a partner that could help make these documents publicly accessible as responsibly as possible. That process is still ongoing. The original documents will also be given to Iraq through its embassy in Washington.

We recovered documents in 11 cities and towns in Iraq, all of which had been under ISIS rule.

Because these localities were on or near the frontline in the battle to retake each area, I could only get past the numerous checkpoints by embedding with the Iraqi unit fighting to take back that town. My team and I were either traveling in their armored personnel carriers, or in our own vehicle but escorted by Iraqi security forces. Before each embed, we met or spoke with the commander of the respective unit — these were officers, not low-level troops — and explained our mission, including that we were looking for ISIS records.

The commanders of the Iraqi units set the parameters, deciding which buildings my team was allowed to visit and assigning soldiers to escort and help us. I was under strict orders to follow directly in their footsteps when they entered buildings, which we feared were mined. In several instances, the soldiers literally held a trash bag open for me as we collected the strewn papers.

The Iraqi security forces agreed to help The New York Times collect and preserve the documents. Based on my extensive reporting, they did so for two broad reasons:

1. We were never first to reach each area. The liberating force took back each neighborhood and if a building was identified as an ISIS headquarter, units of military intelligence were sent in to scour the location for actionable intelligence. From what I saw, they were removing the hard drives of computers and taking a small number of records, focusing especially on documents that included the names of fighters, but leaving the bulk of it behind. The units I was traveling with came immediately after. They in turn had no plans to preserve these documents, and in many locations were burning them. We frequently would seek the necessary permissions to reach a specific building, only to get there and find that Iraqi forces had collected the few documents they needed before setting fire to the rest.

Here is a clip recorded by my colleague Andy Mills, who captured the moment we reached one building in western Mosul only to be told that the unit controlling it had already burned the papers inside:

2. The Iraqi army lost hundreds, if not thousands, of men in the fight to take back northern Iraq from ISIS. Commanders told me that they were frustrated when speaking to coalition partners, who in their view did not seem to understand why the battle was taking so long and didn’t appreciate just how organized ISIS was. They said they supported The Times’s efforts to recover the documents and use them to show how the terror group ran a complex bureaucracy and functioning state, contrary to popular perception.

Dear Aysegul, thank you for your question. I traveled to Iraq five times over a one-year period to collect these documents, and I needed to bring them back because of the enormous amount of work we did to authenticate the records, to translate them, to scan them and to have a portion of the trove professionally photographed.

The first step was making sure these records were original because fraudulent ISIS records have been released. While I was in Iraq, I asked Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who has written a primer on how to identify forged ISIS documents, to go through the cache. Back in New York, I took the documents to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the premier institution studying recovered terrorist records. A team of analysts went over the cache with me and confirmed what Aymenn had concluded: The documents were original.

I also benefited greatly from the scholarship of Mara Revkin, an expert on ISIS at Yale University. I met her in the field in Iraq, and she later came to The Times’ office in New York on multiple occasions to review the documents in the trove and to offer her expert analysis.

The next step was scanning them. In Iraq, my team of three people spent more than a week working all-day to scan documents using our iPhones, but we only got through a portion before I had to return to the United States. In New York, my newsroom colleague Paul Moon spent weeks to scan just the first set of ISIS land leases I had found. In total, members of my team spent close to six weeks scanning documents, and we are still not done.

The next step was translation. For the past year, I have worked with two translators from Iraq, one of whom is from the Mosul area.

Lastly, my colleagues spent several days taking high-end images of the documents featured in my article. This work was done inside our photo studio, something we could not do in Iraq.

Compare the quality of the scan made in Iraq on my iPhone (above) with the photograph taken of the same document by Times photographer Tony Cenicola, which was shot in our New York studio (below):

Finally, this process is ongoing. We are planning more stories and newsletters based on this trove, even as we look for partners to make it publicly available.

Dear Sam, I understand how this looks from here. Put yourself on a battlefield, where almost everything around you has been destroyed and turned to rubble, and the only authority for any distance is the Iraqi military.

The New York Times collected these documents to help explain how a terrorist group like ISIS was able to control such a large area for as long as it did. This is the real story, not one filtered through a government official. It is ISIS in its own words and deeds. How powerful and important. Because the documents were abandoned and in many cases at risk of being destroyed, we decided it was best to gather them, document them and make sure they are available in a safe and responsible way for research. As stated above, the originals will also be given to the country’s government.

Dear Annette, thank you for your question. In keeping with the New York Times’s ethics policy, we never paid for any of the records we recovered. And the Iraqi forces who helped us collect these documents never asked for payment.

Hello, Charlotte, and thank you for your question. We have received private messages from our sources in American and Iraqi intelligence complimenting our article, and that we succeeded in saving these records.

Dear Michael, thank you for your question. At The New York Times, we carefully guard our independence. We are not an extension of law enforcement, and it is important that we do not behave in a way that could give the impression that we are working with, or for, our government.

It is not our job to contact the intelligence community and share intelligence with them. And doing so could put me and my colleagues at risk in a part of the world where reporters are often assumed to be covert informants.

To your question on withholding information, the highlights of what I learned appear in the articles I have published. We are also working to find partners to make the entire trove digitally available. Once that happens, anyone — civilians in Mosul as well as intelligence analysts — will be able to see the material for themselves.

Dear Michael, thanks for your interest in this important work. The founders of this country thought it was important to have an independent press, one that would be able to hold the powerful to account, to bear witness, to provide sunshine on subjects that others would prefer to keep secret. We are not an extension of the government but are instead at the service of the public interest. It is important to remember we are not agents of the state, and as Rukmini said, we are determined to preserve our independence.

In the course of reporting this story, Rukmini spoke to many experts and analysts — both inside and outside of government agencies — to better understand and contextualize what she learned. No one raised any issue about compromising national security.

Had the government raised that issue, we would have listened to those concerns. But we always lean toward publishing based on the nation’s foundational belief — and our long experience — that an informed public is in the best service of democracy.

We always try to understand every side of a story, and sometimes that means trying to get inside the thinking of ISIS, a non-state actor and enemy of the West and free people everywhere.

When we publish, we publish to the entire world. If members of the intelligence community want to know what we found out, all they need to do is subscribe.

Dear Sean, thank you for your question, and for your care. Please know that we would of course remove identifying information if we believed there was a risk to a civilian’s safety.

Thank you for your question, Ryder. The New York Times is seeking a partner to digitize the documents and make them available to everyone online. Since the publication of our article, we have been approached by several academic and nonprofit institutions, and we are in discussions with candidates. And as Michael said above, the original documents will also be given to Iraq through its embassy in Washington.

We have been asking institutions to contact us. We welcome any nonpartisan Iraqi institution that would like to partner with us to contact us. Feel free to send me a message on Twitter or contact the Reader Center.

Dear Charles, thank you for your question, and how I wish it were so easy!

For more than a year, a team of two Arabic translators has been toiling to translate the documents. They have been able to translate the most important papers, but we are not even close to done.

Documents that are posted on a New York Times platform need to be up to the standards of our institution, meaning that the translations need to be exact and free of error. Getting each translation to that standard is time-consuming and costly.

Creating a database to house such a large trove also requires an online infrastructure that we currently do not have. One outside vendor estimated it would cost between $25,000 and $75,000. Hopefully a partner could help us shoulder this investment.

The New York Times is keeping them in a safe and secure location as we wait to finalize a partnership with an institution that will help us digitize them, making them available online.