According to this report, Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi was the real name of the Iraqi man whose best-known pseudonym is Haji Bakr.

He killed in a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014. He was strategic head of the group calling itself "Islamic State" (ISIS).

He was a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein's air defense force who had been secretly pulling the strings at ISIS for years. Still, it was never clear what exactly his role was.

But when the architect of the "Islamic State" died, he left something behind that he had intended to keep strictly confidential: the blueprint for this state.

It is a folder full of handwritten organizational charts, lists and schedules. Some consisting of several pages pasted together.

For the first time, the Haji Bakr documents now make it possible to reach conclusions on how the ISIS leadership is organized and what role former officials in the government of ex-dictator Saddam Hussein play in it.

Above all, however, they show how the takeover in northern Syria was planned, making the group's later advances into Iraq possible in the first place.

according to this report, In 2010, Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir and later "caliph," the official leader of the "Islamic State".

They reasoned that Baghdadi, an educated cleric, would give the group a religious face.