Talking to girls. Fibbing in court. Drinking a beer. A thousand things will get you tortured in the Islamic State. Unless you’re a suspected CIA spy. Then you lose your head.
For all the attention paid to ISIS, relatively little is known about its inner workings. But a man claiming to be a member of the so-called Islamic State’s security services has stepped forward to provide that inside view. This series is based on days of interviews with this ISIS spy. Read part one here and part two here.
Part Three: Ministries of Fear
ISTANBUL — “They have a cage in this square,” Abu Khaled said, describing the place where ISIS justice is meted out in al-Bab, the Syrian town in which, up until recently, he’d served with the state security apparatus of the so-calledIslamic State. This is the same place where beheadings take place from time to time. But the cage is always there, and there’s almost always someone inside.