[Free Beacon] The U.S. is examining a massive collection of digital documents and other data captured from Daesh by Syrian rebels fighting to retake the strategic city of Manbij. The intel includes notebooks, laptops, and USB drives amounting to more than four terabytes of digital information.Military spokesman Chris Garver said that the U.S.-backed fighters, comprised of Kurdish and Arab forces, collected the material as they went throughout villages surrounding Manbij. He said, "It is a lot of material, it is going to take a lot to go through, then start connecting the dots and trying to figure where we can start dismantling ISIS."
The rebels also collected advanced math and science textbooks that had been rewritten to include pro-Daesh word problems.
Daesh has used Manbij as a strategic center to train, indoctrinate, and dispatch foreign fighters. Garver said the U.S. has begun to understand how Daesh processes militants once they migrate to Syria because of information collected around Manbij.
In a speech to soldiers, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that Manbij is one of the final places linking Daesh's self-declared capital of Raqqa to the rest of the world. "And there, we’re already beginning to gain and exploit intelligence that’s helping us map their network of foreign fighters," said Carter.
U.S. special forces last year captured seven terabytes of data in a raid against senior Daesh leader Abu Sayyaf, which unveiled to the U.S. information about the Islamist group's leaders, financing, and security.