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Kidnapping generated $25m for Islamic State last year, according to one US intelligence estimate. It's also a powerful propaganda tool. The business relies on spies, informers, kidnappers, jailers and negotiators who arrange the deals when a captive is released. Syrian journalist Omar Al-Maqdud went to meet some of those who have been involved.
 

Two years ago the American journalist Steven Sotloff came to visit me at my home in the US and told me he was planning a trip to Syria.
 

I tried to persuade him to change his mind but he wouldn't listen. Three days later, he emailed me from near Aleppo asking for help with contacts. Not long after that, he was kidnapped.

Western governments have been urged by a terrorism thinktank to encourage fighters to defect from Islamic State with measures including offering them protection against reprisals.

 

In a report published on Monday, the British-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) said that global lawmakers need to remove legal “disincentives” to those wishing to speak publicly about their newfound hostility to Isis, whose reach spreads across Syria, Iraq and parts of other countries around the world.

 

Controversially, the King’s College London thinktank, which has been at the forefront of tracking the movement of jihadis from the UK and other countries to the Syrian civil war, also recommends that western governments encourage defectors to leave Isis-held territory and then protect them against reprisals.

It is a startling about-turn. The National Union of Students, who have played a considerable role in the dismal recent history of campus censorship, are suddenly sounding as though they have ingested the complete works of John Stuart Mill.

 

The ‘basic function of universities,’ the NUS declare, is ‘introducing students to a variety of opinions and encouraging them to analyse and debate them’. They are warning of  ‘a significant threat to civil liberties and freedom of speech on campuses’. This is a reference to the Prevent counter-terrorism guidelines, which come into force at universities today, and which the NUS is promising to oppose at every level. It is tempting to ask the NUS where all this enthusiasm for free speech has come from. But the temptation should be resisted, because they have a point.

Dozens of Isis recruits have left the Islamic militant group partly because the luxury goods and cars they were promised before they joined failed to materialise, a new paper has found.

 

The report, entitled 'Victims, Perpetrators, Assets: The narratives of Islamic State defectors' looks into the reasons why enthusiastic Isis recruits may have changed their mind and decided to defect from the militant group.

 

Published by London-based think tank The International Centre of the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), the report gives an interesting insight into why defectors left, with stories that the ICSR believes could be vital in stemming the flow of foreign fighters travelling to Syria.