The documents could lead security
officials to those who radicalised the jihadis and facilitated their departure,
experts say.
Tom Cheshire
Technology Correspondent
But even more valuable is their detail.
Each of the approximately 22,000 documents has
detailed information in 23 different categories.
Most interesting will be the entries for the 'countries
travelled through', 'previous fighting experience', 'who recommended him' and
'special skills'.
Entries on the forms include point of entry and who
recommended recruits
Speaking about the discovery of the files, former global
terrorism operations director at MI6 Richard Barrett told Sky News: "It's
a fantastic coup."
"And it will be an absolute goldmine of information
of enormous significance and interest to very many people, particularly the
security and intelligence services."
He added: "There hasn't been anything at
all like this since the discovery of the Sinjar records in 2007 and that only
covered about 700 people (IS fighters entering Iraq), all of whom were from
Arab countries."
Afzal Ashraf, a counter-terrorism expert at the Royal
United Services Institute, told Sky News: "They're probably the most
significant intelligence we've had to date of Da'esh (IS).
"It will give them an indication of not just who
they are, where they come from, but will be able to potentially to lead them to
the individuals who radicalised these individuals as well as facilitated their
departure."
"And it's those people that are really
key. It's these people that are capable of radicalising and sending out foreign
fighters in their dozens."
But there is a huge amount of information here - around
500,000 individual data points.
That could overwhelm human analysts - which is where
machines come in.
The intelligence agencies will set their computers loose
on the data.
By mapping individuals and places, and
establishing the links between them, big data analysis may uncover leads that
would elude humans.
And some of the other categories on the forms 'levels of
obedience' and 'time and place of death' will be useful for a different reason:
the counter-Islamic State narrative.
This is an information war as much as anything.
And this cache of documents is a weapon.
Thursday 10 March 2016
