With the last hardened Islamic State forces in remote areas, the United States is turning to the burning tribes to avenge the atrocities the group unleashed when it ruled parts of Syria and Iraq. Still hungry for revenge eight years after the group, which is also known as Daesh, massacred hundreds of their tribesmen, members of the Sheitaat tribe in Syria had placed a tracking device on the motorcycle Agal was riding when he was killed, one of the people who they spotted him down he said. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up The tribesman, whose account was confirmed by a Western intelligence officer in the region, said tribesmen in contact with the Islamic State commander’s immediate family had been secretly monitoring him for months in northern Syria. “I took blood revenge for those of my tribe whom Daesh crucified, executed and beheaded without mercy,” the man, who declined to be identified for security reasons, told Reuters by phone from Syria. “He has healed the burning in our hearts.” In one of its bloodiest atrocities, Islamic State massacred more than 900 members of the Sheitaat tribe in three towns in Syria’s eastern Deir al-Zor region in 2014 when they rebelled against jihadist rule. While Islamic State is a shadow of the group that ruled a third of Syria and Iraq in a caliphate it declared in 2014, hundreds of fighters are still camped out in desert areas where neither the US-led coalition nor the Syrian army, with Russia-backed and Iran-backed militias are in full control. Arab tribes in Syria seeking revenge are now part of a growing network of tribal spies playing an important role in the US military’s campaign to further degrade the group, three Western intelligence sources and six tribal sources said. “These informant networks are working with the Americans who are planting them everywhere,” said Yasser al-Kassab, a tribal chief from the town of Gharanij in the Deir al-Zor region. “Informants from the same tribe are giving information about their own cousins to the Islamic State,” he said. Asked about the role of tribal informants in Syria, a US military official said that in the operation against Agal, targeting was based almost entirely on human intelligence. “This is something that required a deep network in the region,” said the official, who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
A DEEP NETWORK
The Western Intelligence officer who corroborated the account of Aghal’s killing and the long period of surveillance by tribesmen before the strike was informed of the tribes’ support for counterinsurgency activities by the US-led coalition. The US military, which has about 900 troops in northeastern Syria, said Agal was one of the group’s top five leaders and was responsible for developing Islamic State networks outside Iraq and Syria. The US Central Command said at the time that the strike against Aghal followed extensive planning. read more With many of Islamic State’s foreign commanders killed or detained, Syrians have become increasingly important in its leadership, making the militants more vulnerable to infiltration by other Syrians looking to settle scores, Western and regional intelligence sources said, and three senior members of the clan. While four sources familiar with the intelligence-gathering operation say money is sometimes paid for information, many whistleblowers are driven by revenge for atrocities committed by the group at the height of its power. Some informants were recruited by tribal middlemen who were already part of the network. Others contributed directly through a hotline set up by the coalition to get advice, said Shaitaat tribal chief Kasab. The US military official confirmed that the informants were paid, but did not elaborate. US-funded tribal networks have infiltrated Islamic State cells and collected data on recruits, including fellow tribesmen in some cases, five tribal sources said. The three Western intelligence officers and a regional security official confirmed their accounts. Many of the spies are from the Sheitaat tribe, an offshoot of Syria’s largest tribe, the Akaidat, which fought with US-backed forces to drive Islamic State from swaths of northeastern Syria, capturing the city of Raqqa after a long battle in 2017. “They want revenge, so they resort to working with their relatives to leak information and give locations of IS leaders. They use clan ties,” said Samer al-Ahmad, an expert on jihadist groups who hails from the region.
HUMAN INTELLIGENCE
One of the Western intelligence officers said that human intelligence – as opposed to information gathered from devices such as mobile phones – is now critical because militants increasingly avoid means of communication that are susceptible to surveillance. “Most of the new agents don’t use cellphones or gadgets that were behind major previous foreign jihadist strikes,” said the officer, who is familiar with some of the covert efforts. That human intelligence has been “critical” to the effort to kill and capture top fighters in Syria since the start of the year and played a key role in the Agal case, the US military official said. “A lot of times, human intelligence is going to supplement your other forms of intelligence, information that you get from there or from voice signals and you can supplement that. In this case it really led the collection,” the official said. Agal was hiding in plain sight in northern Syria, spending most of his time in territory held by Turkish-backed Sunni Arab rebels and mostly moving away from areas closer to his city where he could be identified, two of his relatives said. His death was one of several strikes against Islamic State in Syria this year. In February, the group’s leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi died during a US special forces raid in northern Syria, while in June US forces captured another senior leader, Ahmad al Kurdi. read more Agal, Kurdi and the other targeted fighters had slipped back into normal life, mingling among residents of a densely populated area along the Turkish border away from areas controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
HIT ATTACKS
The successful US strikes cheered Ahmad Assad al Hassouni, a high-ranking Sheitaat tribal official who is still searching for the remains of two of his four sons beheaded by Islamic State in 2014. “They slaughtered my sons and burned our hearts,” he said. “I swear to God I won’t sleep until the last criminal is dead” Although Islamic State increasingly lacks the ability to launch large, spectacular attacks, its presence is growing in remote areas of Deir al-Zor where control by the Kurdish-led SDF is shaky, residents said. Overnight, masked men set up checkpoints sowing fear in villages near Busayra along the Euphrates River, five tribal sources said. Meanwhile, hit-and-run attacks on SDF checkpoints have also increased in recent months, tribal chief Sheikh Bashir Dadal said, and the militants have also inflicted heavy casualties on pro-Iranian militias around Palmyra. It was the fear of a resurgence of Islamic State that prompted 32-year-old Abdullah al-Omar to inform his relatives. “I gave information to the coalition about five people, including two cousins from my tribe, who we learned were with Daesh, running checkpoints, burning houses,” said Omar, who hails from Abu Hamam by the Euphrates south of Busayrah. “We can’t sleep easy at night because we know they are still there just waiting for the right moment to take revenge and slaughter those who survived their massacres.” Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comSign up Editing: Tom Perry, Dominic Evans and David Clarke Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
