Leaked documents show how ISIS is building its state: The Guardian

PanARMENIAN.Net - A leaked internal Islamic State manual shows how the terrorist group has set about building a state in Iraq and Syria complete with government departments, a treasury and an economic programme for self-sufficiency, the Guardian reveals.

The 24-page document, obtained by the Guardian, sets out a blueprint for establishing foreign relations, a fully fledged propaganda operation, and centralised control over oil, gas and the other vital parts of the economy.

The manual, written last year and entitled Principles in the administration of the Islamic State, lays bare ISIS’s state-building aspirations and the ways in which it has managed to set itself apart as the richest and most destabilising jihadi group of the past 50 years.

Together with other documents obtained by the Guardian, it builds up a picture of a group that, although sworn to a founding principle of brutal violence, is equally set on more mundane matters such as health, education, commerce, communications and jobs. In short, it is building a state.

As western aircraft step up their aerial war on ISIS targets in Syria, the implication is that the military task is not simply one of battlefield arithmetic. ISIS is already far more than the sum of its fighters.

The document – written as a foundation text to train “cadres of administrators” in the months after ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria on 28 June 2014 – sketches out how to organise government departments including education, natural resources, industry, foreign relations, public relations and military camps.

The text highlights the need for ISIS to achieve a unified culture encompassing foreigners and natives and sets out the need for self-sufficiency by establishing its own independent “factories for local military and food production” and creating “isolated safe zones” for providing for local needs.

The document came from a businessman working within ISIS via the academic researcher Aymenn al-Tamimi, who has worked over the past year to compile the most thorough log of ISIS documents available to the public.

Tamimi said the playbook, along with a further 300 ISIS documents he has obtained over the past year, showed that building a viable country rooted in fundamentalist theology was the central aim. “[ISIS] is a project that strives to govern. It’s not just a case of their sole end being endless battle.”