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Experts Divided on Authenticity of Islamic State Receipts

A Times article based on documents recovered by a researcher reported that ISIS made payments to members of a rival group.

Questions have been raised about documents that seemed to indicate that the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was able to hide out in a hostile area of northwestern Syria because ISIS paid members of a rival jihadist group.

An independent Syria researcher, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, said he believed that the documents, which were central to an article published in The New York Times on Oct. 30, had been forged.

The documents were provided to The Times by Asaad Almohammad, a retired American intelligence operative who is now a senior research fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism.

They purport to be receipts for payments made by the security branch of the Islamic State to members of Hurras al Din, a Syrian jihadist group known to be an enemy of ISIS. The receipts showed that the payments were for services like security and logistical expenses.

After The Times published its article, Mr. Almohammad published a report that also cited the receipts. He said he stood by their authenticity.

Mr. al-Tamimi, who had been asked by The Times to review four of the receipts, was cited in the article as vouching for their authenticity.

He has since reviewed all eight receipts and now says he believes they are forgeries. He concluded that although the receipts appear to be printed on original ISIS stationery, the handwritten information on them was most likely not authentic.

He noted that several of the receipts are dated in 2017, before Hurras al Din was known to have existed. He said part of receipts showing the location of the ISIS branch was whited out, raising questions about their provenance. And he said that a similarity in the handwriting on receipts that purport to have been written by two different people suggests they were written by the same person.

“Unfortunately, this only leads me to the conclusion that they are not authentic,” Mr. al-Tamimi said.

Mr. Almohammad disagreed.

He said that his conclusions are supported not only by the receipts but by interviews with informers in Syria over a 16-month period. His research found that ISIS made a concerted effort to co-opt the rival group, Hurras al Din, starting in January 2017, more than a year before the group announced its formation.

Mr. Almohammad argued that had someone gone to the trouble of forging receipts, he would have been unlikely to date them before the time when Hurras al Din made that announcement. That date is readily available online.

He also rejected the assessment regarding the whited-out material on the receipts. The documents were retrieved by two different people in Syria who did not know each other, he said. “A forger could have kept the original names or added new ones,” he said. “Scrubbing the original is hardly a smart thing to do for a forger.”

As for the similarity in handwriting, Mr. Almohammad said all eight receipts had been issued under the same nom de guerre, which most likely belonged to the ISIS official charged with dispensing the funds. It is possible, he said, that the official filled out the entire receipt, including the portions attributed to the other signatories.

“Taken altogether, I have assessed that given the format, style, timing and sources, the receipts are highly likely to be authentic,” Mr. Almohammad said. “Of course, you can never claim 100 percent verification without the signatories confirming, and even then questions will remain. This is the nature of this work.”

Mr. al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, was living in a zone where Hurras al Din operates, in Idlib Province, as far back as July, according to American officials. He died at his compound there last month during a raid by American Special Operations forces.

Rukmini Callimachi covers Al Qaeda and ISIS and is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Before joining The Times in 2014, she spent seven years reporting from Africa for The Associated Press. More about Rukmini Callimachi

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Authenticity Of Receipts From ISIS Splits Experts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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