Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
To our brothers in the Islamic State, you must deal with the security and media files particular to the organisation [in cooperation] with the higher security office entrusted to the mujahid brother Abu Humam al-Amni, and also see the Supreme Majlis Shura affiliated with the organisation.
And God is the guarantor of success.
Abu Liqa’
2 May 2018
Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
[Stamp]: Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
Unified Amni Diwan
Wilayas sector
Decision: 1323
Letter directed to the personnel of the Islamic State. We ask all the brothers in the organisation on ribat inside and outside the areas of the Islamic State to hurry to form the covert [/security?] Diwans with the help of your brother Abu Humam al-Amni and the brother Abu Ayub al-Ansari. Please also refer a letter via the brothers to the Diwan of Amirship regarding this matter. All the sectors are requested to comply with the orders of the amni brothers, and in the event of there being any fault, the central committee for public security is to be informed, and God is the One behind the intention.
Unified Amni Diwan
Abu Muhammad al-Hashimi
Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
[Stamp]: Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
Unified Amni Diwan
Eastern Sector
Copy: 23
The mujahid brother Abu Osama al-Iraqi is entrusted with tracking the formation of the security matters inside the wilyas and contacting the Unified Amni Diwan as well s bringing all the security portfolios particular to the muhajirin to the Diwan al-Wilaya.
5 March 2018
Amni Diwan
Abu Ayyub al-Ansari
Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
[Stamp]: Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
Unified Amni Diwan
Eastern Sector
All the muhajirin and ansar brothers operating inside the media offices and media teams affiliated with the agencies of the Dawla must go and see the security office to get to know the nature of the course of work in addition to suggesting a mechanism of operation regarding the news of the organisation and the victories. This should take place in a period not exceeding one week.
And God is the one behind the intention.
6 April 2018
Amni Diwan
Abu Ayyub al-Ansari
Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
[Stamp]: Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham
Analysis
In October 2019, the New York Times published forged Islamic State receipts that purported to show payments made by the group to members of the al-Qa’ida-loyalist Hurras al-Din. Those receipts came from Asaad Almohammad, who at the time was a senior fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism (GWUPOE) and was hawking the receipts and other documents with GWUPOE’s director Lorenzo Vidino as advance media hype for a study Asaad was going to publish with GWUPOE allegedly showing the Islamic State’s strategy of co-opting Hurras al-Din. In my own commentary on the affair, I had mentioned that I had been given a set of purported “internal letters” to look at that had also been supplied by Asaad Almohammad. I determined at the time that they were forgeries and I present them above in their originals with translations. They are forgeries for reasons I stated in that post back in 2019. Indeed I must add that they are very poor forgeries. Retrospectively also, I should note that the same ‘Abu Humam al-Amni’ character who appears in two of the above forged letters also appears in the forged receipts, establishing a link between the two sets of forged documents, despite the contrary impression conveyed by Asaad at the time. To be clear, we can all fall for forgeries on occasion and make mistakes, but in this case these forged letters are of such poor quality that I strongly question the judgement of anyone who would endorse them in the first place.
I publish these forgeries now because I have noticed that people still cite Asaad’s other published work on Islamic State from time to time, as though it is somehow separate from these forgeries. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Consider the data he contributed as part of a co-authored study for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. The same study talks repeatedly about a supposed “Unified Security Center” that clearly corresponds to the “Unified Amni Diwan” in these poor forgeries. There is no attestation of these bodies in authentic documentary evidence or other lines of evidence. The same “Unified Security Center” also appears in the data he contributed to a co-authored study in Perspectives on Terrorism.
The justification that some of his work was peer-reviewed prior to publication is also not a basis to take the work as reliable. Peer-review is a human and flawed process. Precise details can escape the attention of peer-reviewers who might only be concerned with giving a general picture, personal biases can come into play etc. Moreover, as is the case with fact-checking at newspapers, there is a major gap in the review process whereby sometimes the only data you have to go by are the data supplied by the writer, with no independent way for the peer-reviewer to verify them. If an author writes a study based on supposed interview data collected from remote locations inside of Syria or Afghanistan (for example) with subjects whose existence cannot be independently confirmed or who cannot be independently accessed, then the reviewer essentially has to take the author’s data on trust. For an author who is not so scrupulous or dishonest or who relies largely or entirely on outsourcing of interviews to individuals whose existence cannot be verified, there is very little in peer-review or fact-checking to prevent fabrication and manipulation of data.
The Islamic State Archives 