Names of 22 000 IS members leaked

Personal details of 22 000 Islamic State recruits - at least 16 of them from Britain - have reportedly been leaked to the media.

Personal details of 22 000 Isis recruits - at least 16 of them from Britain - have reportedly been stolen from the group's security chief and leaked to the media.

A former MI6 officer described the files as a “gold mine” of information.

At first glance the documents, which were taken by a disaffected Isis fighter, look like standard HR forms, recording names, dates of birth, nationalities and phone numbers.

But the recruits are also rated on their “level of obedience”, “level of sharia understanding”, willingness to become a suicide bomber and previous “jihadist experience” on the 23-point form. Grimly, there is even a place to record their “date and place of death”.

It is thought people are required to provide the information when they enter Isis territory for the first time.

The cache of documents was obtained by Sky News, while a pro-opposition Syrian news website, Zaman Al Wasl, also published a selection of the registration forms.

They include names of people already known to have joined Isis, such as the Britons Abdel Bary, Junaid Hussain and Reyaad Khan. Bary, a former rapper from London, was reported last July to have deserted Isis and to be on the run in Turkey. Hussain, from Birmingham, was thought to have been Isis's head of media before he was killed in a US drone strike in August. Khan, from Cardiff, previously appeared in high-profile Isis propaganda video, but was killed in an RAF-led drone strike.

At least 700 people from the UK have travelled to support or fight for jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, according to police, and about half have since returned.

Sky News said it was given the documents on a memory stick stolen by a former Free Syrian Army fighter who switched sides to Isis. The man, who called himself Abu Hamed, said he became disillusioned with the extremist group, saying it had been taken over by former Iraqi soldiers once loyal to Saddam Hussein. He claimed to have stolen the files from the head of Isis's internal security police.

Asked if he thought the documents could be used to destroy Isis, he nodded and said: “God willing.”

Richard Barrett, MI6's former global terrorism operations director, said the documents contained “an absolute goldmine of information of enormous significance and interest to very many people, particularly the security and intelligence services”.

“There hasn't been anything at all like this since the discovery of the Sinjar records [in Iraq] in 2007 and that only covered about 700 people, all of whom were from Arab countries,” he added.

There are people from at least 51 countries listed in the documents, which are written in Arabic and stamped with logos used by the so-called Islamic State.

Zaman Al Wasl, which published details of 1,736 people on the forms, said a quarter were Saudis and the rest mainly Tunisian, Moroccan and Egyptian. France was said to have the highest number of extremists from Europe on the list, followed by Germany and then the UK with 16. Four were said to be from the US and six from Canada.

Timothy Holman, who translated part of the cache into English, said the documents were collected at border crossings into Isis territory between November and December 2013.

The forms' authenticity could not immediately be verified.

A spokesman for the Home Office told The Independent it was “aware” of the apparent leak but said he could not give any further information for security reasons.

The Independent