An Account of the Islamic State's 'Offices' for Geographic Regions and Internal Disagreements

Since the fall of the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria nearly four years ago, detailed information on the inner workings of the organisation has unsurprisingly become harder to come by, and this problem has only become more apparent over time.

One source claiming to offer detailed accounts of how the organisation currently works is an account on TamTam and other social media applications (e.g. Rocket Chat) calling itself “Channel to Expose the Servants of Baghdadi and Hashimi.” The account seems to portray itself as being run by a defector (/defectors?) from the organisation, and it publishes a variety of testimonies and claimed internal Islamic State documents (some of which have already been published on the Internet, whereas others have .

I have known of this channel for some time and expressed my reservations about its reliability before in conversations with my friend Tore Hamming. On the other hand, it is also true that the account leaked information about the death of the group’s previous leader Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi just before the Islamic State itself announced his death- which suggests that the account is unlikely to be pure disinformation, despite its clear agenda. I think therefore the best approach is to make readers and observers aware of its content, and let them adopt and discuss their own opinions on its information, which is likely a mixture of truths, inaccuracies and disinformation whose strands are often not easy to distinguish for the time being.