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Our Islamic State Department of Soldiers paper is out with @gwupoe https://isisfiles.gwu.edu/concern/reports/c247ds10z?locale=en
"Drawing on documents retrieved from northern Iraq as part of The ISIS Files project and other archival sources, this paper examines the group’s Diwan al-Jund (Soldier’s Department) exploring how the Islamic State managed its war department across its Iraqi and Syrian provinces."
a conceptualization of the department
a snapshot/construction of an order of battle from 2015ish
the department worked more like a man/train/equip force that sent different types of forces to the different fronts, based on specialization, and assigned them to local commanders for operational control, even if admin control was shared with its parent unit.
Shari'a advisors at the battalion and platoon level
this is something Islamic State current leader al-Mawla was doing in 2007 when he was the Shari'i of Mosul according to the CTC TIRs released recently https://ctc.usma.edu/the-al-mawla-tirs-an-analytical-discussion-with-cole-bunzel-haroro-ingram-gina-ligon-and-craig-whiteside/
the group invested in religious advisors at very low level which was fascinating, and is hard to find in other armies (think political commissars in the Soviet, representatives on mission in revolutionary France):
among the ISIS Files was a leadership guide found in its Mosul leadership academy authored in 2007 by Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the first minister of war. We had included the text in the ISIS Reader (Ch 4) so it was familiar; interesting to see it in the files https://www.amazon.com/ISIS-Reader-Milestone-Islamic-Movement/dp/0197501435
The important impact of the Department of Soldiers on the larger global enterprise can be found in this recent @HudsonInstitute paper on the routinization of the global enterprise: https://www.hudson.org/research/preview/16798-the-routinization-of-the-islamic-state-s-global-enterprise
Thanks @DevorahMargolin and the @gwupoe team for including us in the ISIS Files project, and @ajaltamimi and @p_vanostaeyen for their invaluable critiques. Thanks to General Wolff and @KatieZimmerman for their analysis on today's debut panel. Posted soon: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj9SxXNalSa8eyulvJmOcIA/featured
Check out the paper at the GW POE site and the original documents - now curated thanks to the GW library. https://isisfiles.gwu.edu/concern/reports/c247ds10z?locale=en
