> After he returned to Aleppo he was visited by a Syrian military intelligence officer who directed him to write up a report on his captivity by ISIS. He did, leaving out the part about sharing the location of the equipment in Saraqib. He paid a bribe to the officer to not look too deeply into the matter and that was the end of it.

Crazy story, very interesting read

Thank you for sharing.

This actually scratches an itch I've had on and off over the years. Over a decade ago, I remember reading a Quora post along the lines of 'How does ISIS still have internet? Who maintains the infrastructure?', and the only response was from an alleged ISIS propagandist (or an internet troll) with vagueries about the reach of ISIS, and that they couldn't answer for "security reasons".

That question lived in my head on and off throughout college, and I'm glad to have gotten a bit closer to understanding the reality of what was happening on the ground.

This is fascinating and the interleaving of statecraft and misdirection was also interesting. Snowden turned out to be led astray here by someone telling him a rumor while it was as simple as ISIS capturing a network engineer who told them how to sabotage the network (not to mention various other sabotage or accidental problems like mining or explosions)

Wow. That was unlike anything else I’ve read.

Super interesting reads, curious does anybody have book recommendations for similar type of stories.

Super interesting article. Thanks for sharing - the ISIS story was thrilling.