1. Some big news: I found the first cache of ISIS documents during an embed with Iraqi troops in the village of Omar Khan in 2016. From that day until now, I’ve struggled with the question of how to make the records we discovered & saved available both to Iraqis & to the public?
2. My team returned to Iraq five times, spending months in the field, collecting some 15,000+ pages of internal ISIS records. It took 3 months for a professional scanner in Delaware to digitize them, and last week, the trove was handed over to Iraq via it’s embassy in Washington.
3. And after a monthslong search, the New York Times has signed a partnership with George Washington University, one of the premiere institutions studying terrorism. They will be creating a virtual library of the trove, so that it is available to everyone: nytco.com/the-new-york-t…
4. Before we even published my first ISIS Files story in April, we began researching internally how to make the documents available to the public. It became clear quickly that it was an undertaking that outstripped the resources of @nytimes: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
5. For example, just scanning all 15,000 pages took a team of professional document handlers more than 12 weeks, working 8 hours a day. And don’t get me started on how much it cost. So we began speaking to academic institutions, both in America and abroad. @gwupoe
6. Over many months, @nytimes spoke to over a dozen academic candidates, in a search led by my talented colleague @HannahPoferl. Among the requirements we had: The institution needed to be non-partisan & not connected to the US government; They had to be specialized in the topic.
7. And crucially, they had to be committed to making the trove available as an online database, free-of-cost to *everyone* - not just their own academics but to the public at large. @gwupoe meets all these requirements & has generously agreed to invest heavily to make this happen
8. @gwupoe is going to invest to translate the files and to create a state-of-the-art database, which will be searchable. I’m not at liberty to say how much this will cost, but let’s just say it’s not cheap and we are sincerely grateful to them.
10. “The ISIS Files” now has its own URL and homepage at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism: extremism.gwu.edu/isis-files
