An ISIS defector just revealed how the group could start to fracture
The ISIS defector, who goes by the pseudonym Abu Khaled, spoke with Michael Weiss at length in Istanbul, Turkey about ISIS and its internal operations.
According to Abu Khaled, although ISIS relies upon foreign fighters, its leaders still fear that those militants might not be entirely loyal and are concerned that ISIS could fracture along national or ethnic lines.
Previously, Khaled told Weiss, foreign fighters would be organized into battalions based upon their origin for ease of communication and control. But this practice has been halted following the dissolution of a 750-strong Libyan brigade, known as al-Battar, that was deemed to be insufficiently loyal to ISIS' overall hierarchy.
"Its men, ISIS found, were more loyal to their emir than they were to the organization," Weiss writes. "So al-Battar was disbanded."
This distrust of foreign fighters has now led ISIS to create battalions with fighters of mixed origin, even when some of those fighters aren't Arabic speakers.
Abu Khaled told Weiss that ISIS officials in Raqqa, Syria denied his request to form a French-speaking battalion due to the earlier experience with the Libyans.
"They told me, 'We had a problem before with the Libyans. We don't want the French in one katiba [battalion],'" Abu Khaled said.
Two senior ISIS officials were apparently killed during the infighting.
Tensions are also reportedly emerging between ISIS foreign fighters and local Syrians. These divisions undermine a key propaganda concept within ISIS - namely, the unity of all practicing Muslims within its "caliphate."
"We're seeing basically a failure of the central tenet of ISIS ideology, which is to unify people of different origins under the caliphate," Lina Khatib, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told The Washington Post in March. "This is not working on the ground. It is making them less effective in governing and less effective in military operations."