(1) “One takeaway is that reporting on the Islamic State is one of the industry’s near-impossible feats.“ I agree strongly with this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/28/subject-nyt-caliphate-podcast-series-charged-with-perpetrating-hoax/?fbclid=IwAR1FtYvZOlzRFxvhIYWqn4wR4UvounTuGSuShVJl5c-TQPeryJWfBugSKHE

(2) We spent 6 months last year working on the stories of two individuals who had certainly been to Syria and one of my biggest takeaways was that the full truth of what many did in the Caliphate is near-unknowable.

(3) Lies are routine, sometimes because the individuals are covering up details that will harm their cases, other times, perhaps because life in that place was deeply traumatising & hard to recalibrate after the event.

(4) I’ve also questioned whether many people have simply rewritten their own internal narrative in order to justify themselves to themselves. Sometimes intel sources can help. Often they have limited info themselves; sometimes they just get it wrong.

(5) Does that mean it’s not worth the effort? No. But this is a far more complex picture than many stories admit, and as an industry we must be honest about that.