Boston Globe: The terrorist bureaucracy: Inside the files of the Islamic State in Iraq. An exclusive look at captured documents reveals the tight organizational structure — and vulnerabilities — of a violent movement

“The group takes a bureaucratic, systematized approach to maintaining power that makes it look in some ways more like a settled government than a fly-by-night band of extremists. Whether under the flag of the Islamic State, or ISIS before that, the group organizes the territory it administers into well-defined geographic units, levies taxes in areas it controls, and manages large numbers of fighters across a sparsely populated territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom. Its formal administrative capacity is a substantial strength, one inherited from its predecessor organizations, Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, and the Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI. It also has an important side effect: It creates a massive paper trail dating back years, long before the group’s current incarnation, which is only just beginning to be studied. Our team has analyzed 144 of AQI’s and the ISI’s own financial and managerial documents. Captured by coalition and Iraqi forces between 2005 and 2010, these include scans of typed documents, as well as electronic files found on hard drives, USB sticks, and other media. Among them are spreadsheets listing the qualifications and training of hundreds of fighters, details on thousands of individual salary payments, and massive lists of itemized expenditures. There are also instructions outlining geographic areas of responsibility for subunits, memos suggesting minor changes to organizational structures, and periodic management reports of all kinds. These documents were recently declassified by the US military and cleared for release as part of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point’s Harmony Program. They represent an important window into how a group like the Islamic State works, and potentially offer hints about how to stop it.”