Back in March, German intelligence began talking up its acquisition of a secret document listing 22,000 “foreign ISIS recruits.” The reliability of the list was questioned, with those familiar with the situation noting that since the interest in ISIS led to an influx of Western spies in southern Turkey, a cottage industry has cropped up to sell “documents” to the spies, most “really shoddily-made forgeries.”
NBC News is now touting their own acquisition of their own list from a “defector” back in March, and claims to have “uncovered” a cell of three Americans who went overseas around that time and were also on the list they got.
The three were identified as 24-year-old Jaffrey Khan of Palo Alto, the son of a medical company’s owner, Rasel Raihan from Ohio, whose backstory is that he got caught cheating in online games back when he was in highschool, and Rasel’s elder sister Zakia Nasrin, who is reportedly married to Jaffrey.
Details of the three are scant, beyond NBC claims they were “brainwashed” on the Internet and then left the country. What they’re actually doing is totally unclear, however, though NBC was able to accost their relatives in the US and get some of their family members to publicly disown them, so if they ever do come back to the US, that’s going to be an awkward series of conversations.