An ISIS document leaked to the public confirms the terrorists are focusing not only on attacking their enemies, they are also creating a well-organized government in the areas they occupy.
A Georgia State University researcher who monitors and investigates ISIS terrorists says the document is a reminder that no one should underestimate them.
The ISIS document, in just 23 pages, lays out a blueprint for the powerful, terrorist government that ISIS intends to impose, ultimately, everywhere.
"This is the hard evidence that these structures are in place," said Charlie Winter, a Senior Research Associate with GSU's Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative. "Namely, that (ISIS) is an incredibly strategic, well-structured and carefully-planned organization.... And this document is extremely important in shedding light on what that strategy is."
Winter, who works in London, told 11Alive News Monday that the document, leaked to the Guardian newspaper in London, confirms that the Islamic State is trying to create a multi-layered government bureaucracy in its occupied areas -- a government that is trying to figure out how to plan and control everything for its soldiers and its civilian citizens, right down to the best ways to indoctrinate children.
"It's indoctrinating an entire generation of children in Syria and Iraq," Winter said. "There is this industrial-scale indoctrination going on. They're focusing on indoctrinating them, training them, educating them in its particularly austere, extreme version of Jihadism. We've never seen something quite on this scale."
Winter said the document underscores that ISIS does nothing spontaneously, but plans everything in detail, long in advance -- including the way the terrorists rule once they've conquered.
"It's given us insight into the organization that, previously, people could only suspect," Winter said. "It is not just a run-of-the-mill terrorist group that is irrational, bloodthirsty and fanatical.... The people who are running the shop for Islamic State... these people know what they're doing. They aren't thinking in terms of short term gain. They're thinking in terms of long term entrenchment."
So Winter said the leaked document should help the U.S. and its allies understand better how to destroy ISIS.
"I think, first of all, it resolutely undermines the assumption that we can treat Islamic State just like a terrorist group that just needs to be dampened or fought back. It's incredibly important to realize that Islamic State has very deep political, economic and social roots in the areas that it controls. And it has those roots because it's built them very slowly. As much as it's a terrorist organization, it's an insurgent group. So it needs to be dealt with, with a robust counter-insurgency doctrine that, at the moment, we aren't looking at. At the moment we're focusing on bombs from the air, or supporting the Kurds, or something like that, but really we need to be looking at winning hearts and minds as well, which is a very difficult thing for the West to do."
