ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria have managed to seize “massive amounts” of data and intelligence from besieged Islamic State (ISIS) militants in that key town. “We think this is a big deal,” the spokesman for the US-led anti-ISIS Operation Inherent Resolve, Col. Christopher Garver told reporters on Wednesday in a teleconference to the Pentagon from Baghdad. Data captured was spread across 4.5 terabytes and information contained on laptops, flash-drives, notebooks and textbooks. Manbij, Garver explained, is very important for ISIS since it links their Raqqa stronghold to the Turkish border. Intelligence taken from ISIS there will tell the coalition a lot about the organization the Colonel said. “[From] that material we’re sifting through, we figured out they ran several foreign fighter reception staging areas inside Manbij [where] a foreign fighter would enter,” Garver explained. “They would screen them, figure out what languages they speak, assign them a job and send them down into wherever they were going to go, be it into Syria or Iraq,” he added. The amount of ISIS activity in the contested area where the US-coalition has flown 520 airstrikes in support of the SDF who have the city surrounded on all sides, doesn’t surprise Garver. Among the documents seized from ISIS were “textbooks on how to control the lives of everybody that’s inside it [ISIS territory], how everyone should live their lives, and how if you don’t live your life that way, you’re an enemy of the state – of the so-called, self-proclaimed state.” “This is unlike any other organization that we’ve fought before,” he added, “and with this sort of totalitarian attempt to control everything, it poses a significant threat not just to the people inside, but everybody that they want to expand out to, as well.” During last week’s meeting of defense and foreign ministers in Washington the ambassador to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk said that the US wants “to make sure that all information is disseminated in a coherent way among our coalition partners so that we can track the networks from the core and all the way to wherever the dots might connect, whether that is in Europe or in North Africa or Southeast Asia.” Also Garver said that the capture of all this information is hugely significant since it clearly shows how they ran Manbij and planned to expand. “Anything that can connect us to the external operations from Syria is a benefit to everybody. It benefits the whole global coalition that is working to counter ISIL’s [ISIS] operations around the world.”
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