Dabiq, Paris and Attackers Identified

Posted on November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 by Denise Simon

Dabiq #7 PJMedia: On February 12, 2015, the Islamic State (ISIS) released the seventh issue of its English-language magazine Dabiq. The 83-page issue celebrates the recent attacks in Paris, justifies the burning of the Jordanian pilot, and calls for Muslims in the West to join ISIS, among other topics discussed. It also includes interviews with Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of Paris kosher supermarket attacker Amedy Coulibaly, and with Belgian ISIS fighter Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the leader of the Verviers cell that planned major attacks in Belgium. Much more here.

Images of the moment suspect in Paris attacks was captured.

MiddleEastEye: French prosecutors said seven people carried out the attacks in Paris on Friday, all of whom were either killed by police or killed themselves with suicide vests. Meanwhile, French police are hunting with Belgian police for a suspected “sleeper cell” linked to the attacks.

Authorities have released the identities – or assumed identifies – of five thought to be directly involved in the Paris attacks, and two others believed to have either planned or aided them. Here are the details and backgrounds of those known so far:

Alleged mastermind – Abdelhamid Abaaoud

A French official told the AP news agency on Monday that Abaaoud is a Belgian and the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks. They released few details, but also linked him to an an attempted gun attack on a Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris train on 21 August, which was thwarted by passengers. RTL radio in France reported that the 27-year-old is of Moroccan origin and “one of the most active Isis executioners” in Syria. He was interviewed in the Islamic State (IS) English-language propaganda magazine Dabiq under the nom de guerre, Abu Umar al-Baljiki.

Bataclan attacker – Samy Amimour

Described by prosecutors as a 28-year-old Frenchman. Amimour was one of three people who attacked the Bataclan concert venue, with 89 people confirmed dead. Prosecutors said Amimour had been charged in a terrorism investigation in 2012, was placed under judicial supervision and was the subject of an international arrest warrant.

Amimour was reported as having lived in the north-eastern suburb of Drancy.

Prosecutors said Amimour was “known to anti-terrorist investigators for being charged on October 19, 2012 for conspiracy to commit terrorism” over a foiled attack in Yemen. He violated his judicial supervision in 2013, prompting judges to issue an international arrest warrant. His family told AFP, in an interview before Friday’s attacks in Paris took place, that he had gone to Syria in 2013.

Bataclan attacker – Ismael Omar Mostefai

The 29-year-old French national was identified by French officials by DNA from a severed fingertip. Mostefi had a record of petty crime in France and had been identified by police as “radicalised”. Turkey on Monday said that they had warned France on two occasions about Mostefi’s activities.

He was reported to have been raised in Courcouronnes in Essonne, 25km south of Paris. His parents, or at least his father, is believed to have been of Algerian descent and his family now lives in the small town of Romilly-sur-Seine, a small town 130km east of Paris.

Mostefi’s 34-year-old brother contacted police on his own initiative before being taken into custody, along with his father. The father’s home in Romilly was searched, along with his brother’s home in nearby Bondoufle.

Stade de France bomber – Ahmad al-Mohammad

A suicide bomber, who blew himself up outside the Stade de France stadium, was found with a Syrian passport with the name Ahmad al-Mohammad, a 25-year-old born in Idlib. The prosecutor’s office says fingerprints from the attacker match the passport, which passed through Greece in October. Greece says he was one of two attackers who passed through their territory in the months before the attack. Serbia yesterday said the passport was also registered at the Presevo border crossing on 7 October, where he formally sought asylum.

Whether Mohammad is the real name of the attacker remains in doubt, however. The passport had been reported fake in the days after the attacks in Paris, and there is a thriving trade in the Middle East for such items. Prosecutors in France on Monday said the name “remained to be verified”.

Stade de France bomber – Bilal Hadfi

Identified by investigation insiders as a 20-year-old French national who had been living in Belgium. He is reported to have fought for the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

Restaurant attacker – Brahim Abdeslam

Officials identified Abdelslam as an attacker who blew himself up near a cafe on the Boulevard Voltaire. He was described as a French national and the brother of Salah Abdelslam, who is the subject of an arrest warrant over the Paris attacks.

Alleged fixer – Salah Abdelslam

Abdelslam, a 26-year-old born in Brussels, was arrested late Monday morning. Authorities said Abdeslam rented a Volkswagen Polo that carried attackers to the Bataclan concert venue. French officials told the AP news agency on Saturday that police had questioned and released him early in the day after stopping a car carrying three men near the Belgian border. An arrest warrant, describing Abdelslam as armed and dangerous, had been issued hours before.

How ISIS Learns the Tactics, the eBook Series

Posted on November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 by Denise Simon

The terror cells across the globe are hardly operating in the Dark Ages, but rather they are tech savvy and are using published books on the internet written by experts. They have developed plans far beyond what world leaders are equipped to handle both in the realms of diplomacy or militarily.

Europe is returning to the Dark Ages [due to the financial recession]. Armed gangs are forming into militias for racist politicians, and a young Muslim minority is their enemy. All this while a Caliphate is growing across the Mediterranean sea next door. How does this mix of chaos lead to the conquest of Rome (the capital of Europe)? Read: Black Flags from Rome – to find out how.

Paris, photo on the left.

Europeans go to Syria: Many young Sunni Muslims from Europe would go in Aid convoys to Syria to help the oppressed Syrians who had been abandoned by the entire world. They would provide them humanitarian aid, and give them moral support. Some would even join armed groups there similar to how the earlier generation had defended Bosnia. Many of them simply wanted the war to end, for peace to prevail, and for the Syrian Muslims to live a safe life without Bashar al-Assad being a dictator over them. However, as hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed by Bashar, the West could not justify Bashar’s stay in power, but they were also uncertain about how the strongest [Islamic] fighting groups in Syria would rule after his removal. So they simply waited, hoping to see a clearer perspective on who could win the war. Depending on who the victor was, they would plan accordingly. The Islamic State re-awoke within the midst of this Syrian war, after the exit of American troops from Iraq in 2010. Many of the Muslim emigrants who came to help the Syrians joined the Islamic State. Sunni armed groups who were being funded by Arab regimes were paid to fight the Islamic State instead of the real enemy Bashar al Assad, so the Islamic State fought back. The Western powers would not get involved in physical ground combat because they had just withdrawn from a failed war in Iraq (their public wouldn’t be happy with it.) This opportunity gave the Islamic State to grow stronger, with more fighters and more territory and resources as the world watched on.

Those who had left Europe to join the Islamic State would now be able to help other Europeans’ get into Syria. They would give them Tazkiyah (recognition of ‘purity’ from being a spy or agent). The Tazkiyah meant that the fighter of the Islamic State in Syria trusted his friend to join the Islamic State. As a result, thousands of new generation Muslims from Europe and from around the world were able to get into Syria and train in the Training camps of the Islamic State. Here they could learn basic armed/shooting combat, assassination techniques, how to make exp0sives from homemade materials etc.

As soon as the Syrian Jihad begun, the Islamic State competed with other groups to capture the vast Syrian-Turkish border. All groups wanted to control this border so they could access Turkey. Turkey was strategic because it was the place where its fighters could buy equipment from, from where all foreign fighters would enter to join the Islamic State and most importantly – where its experienced fighters would leave Syria (as ‘refugees’) into Turkey, and from Turkey would enter into Europe. [Note: many Syrian refugees were even escaping to Italy due to the civil war in Syria. No doubt, some of these refugees were undercover fighters of Al Qa’idah and the Islamic State. They were quick to take the opportunity of entering into the different countries of Europe (most probably as early as 2012). All this was happening under the nose of the European intelligence services whose job during this time (2012) was only to prevent European Muslims from entering Syria. (This shows how quick the Islamic groups were in planning ahead. Years before Europe even knew where its Muslim citizens were going – experienced Islamic fighters had already found safety in Europe.) While the experienced Islamic State fighters left Syria for Europe, the European Muslims who had emigrated to the Islamic State would train within the Training camps, and nobody doubted -neither the Islamic State, nor the West- that some of these trainees would be sent back to Europe to form their own secret cells to continue the Jihad and to seek revenge for the Western occupation of Muslim lands. These fighters would simply receive their training and be told to go back to their European home countries, to go into ‘sleeper cell’ mode until the Khalifah (Caliph) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ordered to start attacks in Europe.

Threat: Immigration/Visa Waiver to U.S. From Europe

Posted on November 15, 2015November 15, 2015 by Denise Simon

This is the second major attack in Paris in less than a year, but not the only 2 by any means. The Charlie Hebdo attack gave us wider connections to jihadis from Belgium and Germany as well as a spotlight on functional cells in France. This recent attack in France is no different, where the same countries are the same once again.

The FBI has declared they cannot keep up with the flow of refugees and immigrants into the United States, not enough resources and there are more than 900 actives ISIS domestic cases currently being worked by the FBI.

Many in Washington DC and even some Republican candidates are calling for closing the borders and full suspension of visa programs, which this blogger has been calling for at least 2 years long.

Now, more chilling, The Visa Waiver Program (VWP) allows citizens of participating countries* to travel to the United States without a visa for stays of 90 days or less.

A partial list of the countries as declared and managed by the U.S. State Department includes in the visa waiver program:

B Flag of Belgium Belgium Flag of Brunei Brunei

C Flag of Chile Chile Flag of Czech Republic Czech Republic

D Flag of Denmark Denmark

E Flag of Estonia Estonia

F Flag of Finland Finland Flag of France France

G Flag of Germany Germany Flag of Greece Greece

It is worse as reported by the CTC, counter-terrorism center.

CTC Perspectives – The French Foreign Fighter Threat in Context

November 14, 2015

Author(s): Daniel Milton

In the immediate aftermath of the multi-pronged terrorist assault in Paris, policymakers, practitioners, and the press began to focus on the possibility that returnees from Iraq and Syria had participated in carrying out the tragic attacks. This possibility of a connection was further strengthened by the discovery of a Syrian passport on one of the suicide bombers and a number of witnesses to the attacks who claimed that the attackers referenced Iraq and Syria, with one account claiming that one of the terrorists shouted, “This is for Syria.”[1]

While the exact role that foreign fighters may have played in these attacks will likely remain unclear for the near future, the threat posed by returning fighters has been a central focus of counterterrorism efforts for some time. By utilizing a unique source of open-source data on foreign fighters that the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point has been collecting over the past year, which has resulted in the collection of 182 detailed records of French foreign fighters (as part of a much larger set of Western foreign fighters), this CTC Perspectives endeavors to offer a bit of context regarding the French foreign fighter threat.

One of the claims made by a number of witnesses of the Paris attacks was the relatively youthful appearance of some of the attackers. Indeed, early indications about one of the individuals is that he was a 29-year-old French national.[2] This seems consistent with what we see among French fighters in the CTC dataset, in which the average age was approximately 25. In other words, young individuals seem to form a large portion of the French foreign fighter contingent. The appeal of organizations like the Islamic State among youth is not particularly surprising given their slick propaganda campaign and social media outreach, but the involvement of younger fighters in the Paris attack, if proven to be the case, may raise additional questions about the implications of such a youthful appeal.

Another way in which foreign fighters could contribute to an attack similar to what occurred in Paris is if they carried knowledge of the streets and terrain above and beyond that which would be attained through weeks or months of pre-operation surveillance. The 29-year-old individual mentioned earlier is said to be from Courcouronnes, a location 20 miles south of Paris. In our data of French foreign fighters, we were able to ascertain the hometown of 145 of the fighters. Approximately 25 percent of the French fighters in our dataset came from the Paris-metro area. As would be expected given the large population of the city and its suburbs, this number represents one of the largest concentrations of foreign fighters. It is worth noting that the southern region of France accounts for 42 percent of fighters in our dataset, although they are spread throughout a number of smaller towns and locations across the southern part of the country.

One of the most difficult things for security services to assess is what kinds of skills and training foreign fighters receive while in Iraq and Syria. The fact that they could have acquired sufficient training to plan and execute the Paris attacks seems self-evident after the fact, but is also evident from examining the limited data we were able to collect in this project. We were only able to assess the operational role filled by foreign fighters for 84 of our French foreign fighters. Of that limited number, however, we found evidence that at least 50 of them served as foot soldiers, gaining valuable front-line experience in carrying out operations under pressure. Of course, as shown in the still shots from the Islamic State propaganda videos below, the Islamic State operates a number of training camps in Iraq and Syria where incoming fighters receive training tactics and weapons that could be applied in a number of settings, whether on the battlefield or when they return to their home countries.

It also emerged that at least 7 of the 8 Paris attackers died by detonating suicide devices, bringing for the first time in France’s history the phenomenon of suicide bombing to its homeland.[3] Despite the newness of this tactic in the French homeland, our data also show that a number of French foreign fighters that traveled to Iraq and Syria set the precedent of dying for the cause. Indeed, at least 14 of the French fighters in our data either died in suicide bombings in Iraq and Syria or expressed a willingness to do so. Beyond suicide bombings alone, we were able to confirm that 23 percent of the French foreign fighters in our dataset died in Iraq and Syria. In other words, the expectation of being willing to die for the cause has been set for French fighters to emulate.

To be clear, the fact that such an expectation is perpetuated among fighters in Syria is not a supposition, but something that they themselves have confirmed in interviews. In the words of Abu Mariam, a 24-year old foreign fighter for France:

Martyrdom is probably the shortest way to paradise, which is not something I was told. I did witness my martyred friends, noticing contentment on their faces and the smell of musk coming out of their corpses, unlike those of the dead disbelievers, the enemies of Allah, whose faces only exhibit ugliness, and whose corpses smell worse than pigs.[4]

Although our data focuses mainly on Western foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, we also collected a number of records, 32 to be precise, of French individuals deemed to be facilitators of foreign fighter travel. While those who carry out violence tend to garner the most attention, it important to remember that the same networks that facilitate travel may very well also be used by the organization to help returnees carry out attacks, or to do so on their own. It is too soon to say whether such a facilitation network played a role in the Paris attacks, but the sheer size, scale, and complexity of the attacks would suggest the participation of a network larger than just a couple of returned foreign fighters. The possibility of a broader facilitation network reaches beyond France. Reports of arrests related to the Paris attacks have emerged from Germany and Belgium.

Within the next month, the CTC will be publishing the first of a series of reports related to the broader issue of foreign fighters that examines the question of foreign fighter radicalization. It is our hope that this collection and analysis effort will contribute to understanding the enduring threat posed by foreign fighters.

Daniel Milton is an Assistant Professor at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

The views presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or any of its subordinate commands.

[1] Rose Troup Buchanan, “Paris terror attacks: Syrian passport found on body of suicide bomber at Stade de France,” Independent, 14 November 2015; Andrew C. McCarthy, “This is for Syria…Allahu Akbar,” National Review, November 13, 2015.

[2] Adam Nossiter, Aurelien Breeden, and Katrin Bennhold, “Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS,” New York Times, November 14, 2015.

[3] Of course, the French people have dealt with this type of terrorism before, having been targeted alongside American military personnel on October 23, 1983 in a twin truck bombing in Beirut, Lebanon.

[4] Loubna Mrie, Vera Mironova, and Sam Whitt, “I am only looking up to paradise,” Foreign Policy, October 2, 2014.

Sanctuary City Supporter to Head Border Patrol?

Posted on November 10, 2015November 10, 2015 by Denise Simon

Chief Fong drew criticism in June 2008 for failing to complete firearm recertification for over five years though all San Francisco police officers are required to recertify annually by department regulations. Chief Fong was quoted as saying that she was too busy to recertify. When the controversy erupted in the local media, she was recertified a week later. Additionally, in 2003 there was a police scandal in San Francisco where she was involved but skirted prosecuted.

Sources: Vocal supporter of sanctuary cities on short list to be next head of Border Patrol

FNC: A former San Francisco police chief and vocal supporter of a sanctuary cities policy is on a short list of candidates to become the new chief of the Border Patrol, according to sources.

As police chief, Heather Fong shielded illegal immigrants, including aliens who committed crimes, from deportation. In contrast, it is the job of the U.S. Border Patrol to catch and deport all illegal immigrants, including those with a criminal history.

“If they bring (a police chief) in for political purposes based on the sanctuary cities model, that politicizes the job and I think it completely undermines credibility and morale in the organization,” House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, told Fox News.

“If you have someone who is advocating for sanctuary cities, that’s the opposite side. They welcome these illegal immigrants to stay in the country. And so I think it’s at cross-purpose with the mission itself.”

Fong, according to Border Patrol, DHS and Capitol Hill sources, is one of several candidates to replace current chief Mike Fischer, who announced his resignation last month.

Fong is currently an assistant secretary for state and local law enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security. If tapped, she would be the first outsider to lead the Border Patrol in its 90-year history.

That decision is up to Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske, who released a statement Monday saying, “”At this time, CBP has not begun the search for the Chief of the U.S. Border Patrol. It is completely false that any individual could be a potential candidate at this time. We are currently preparing the paperwork to begin the process.”

Rank and file agents were surprised she would be considered.

“The appointment of Heather Fong would prove that the Border Patrol is no longer the enforcement agency that Congress and the American public intended it to be,” according to a statement released by Brandon Judd, head of the agents’ union.

“Heather Fong oversaw a sanctuary city, which is directly contrary to our mission. Her appointment would be for political purposes and the trust of the men and woman of the Border Patrol in DHS and CBP leadership would be lost.”

During her five years as the chief of SFPD, Fong refused to cooperate with ICE, telling reporters in November 2008, “We do not cooperate with ICE when they go out for enforcement of immigration violations of the law.”

A few months earlier, she appeared in a public service campaign telling illegal immigrants they’re welcome in the city. In promoting San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy on TV, radio, posters and brochures in five languages, Fong said illegal immigrants had nothing to fear under her watch. “San Francisco is committed to providing safe access to public services to our communities,” she said.

In a news conference unveiling the campaign, she told reporters, “We do not work on enforcing immigration laws.”

The chief of the Border Patrol position does not require congressional approval. But given the “border security first” mentality among many on Capitol Hill, McCaul said he believes bringing in an outsider could be a hard sell.

The Billion Dollar Fleece of Taxpayers at DHS

Posted on November 9, 2015November 9, 2015 by Denise Simon

There are defined dollars assigned to projects, when there is no enough money or the timeline for completion is missed, who says stop and inspects why? What have members of Congress been told, if anything? Who spends a billion dollars with no results? Sure, this Federal government. The same playbook applied to Obamacare and countless other government operations. Where is the outrage and will this too head to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for investigation?

It should be noted that the Ellis Island did this successfully as did Ancestry.com.

A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just 1 is online

WaPo: Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials.

From the start, the initiative was mismanaged, the records and interviews show. Agency officials did not complete the basic plans for the computer system until nearly three years after the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM, and the approach to adopting the technology was outdated before work on it began.

By 2012, officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes USCIS, were aware that the project was riddled with hundreds of critical software and other defects. But the agency nonetheless began to roll it out, in part because of pressure from Obama administration officials who considered it vital for their plans to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, according to the internal documents and interviews.

Only three of the agency’s scores of immigration forms have been digitized — and two of these were taken offline after they debuted because nearly all of the software and hardware from the original system had to be junked.

The sole form now available for electronic filing is an application for renewing or replacing a lost “green card” — the document given to legal permanent residents. By putting this application online, the agency aimed to bypass the highly inefficient system in which millions of paper applications are processed and shuttled among offices. But government documents show that scores of immigrants who applied online waited up to a year or never received their new cards, disrupting their plans to work, attend school and travel.

“You’re going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we’re still a paper-based agency,’’ said Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. “It’s a huge albatross around our necks.’’

DHS officials acknowledge the setbacks but say the government is well on the way to automating the immigration service, which processes about 8 million applications a year. The department has scrapped the earlier technology and development method and is now adopting a new approach relying in part on cloud computing.

“In 2012, we made some hard decisions to turn the Transformation Program around using the latest industry best practices and approaches, instead of simply scratching it and starting over,’’ said Shin Inouye, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services. “We took a fresh start — a fix that required an overhaul of the development process — from contracting to development methodology to technology.’’

“Since making these changes, we have been able to develop and deploy a new system that is able to process about 1.2 million benefit requests out of USCIS’s total annual work volume,” Inouye added. “Our goals remain to improve operations, increase efficiency, and prepare for any changes to our immigration laws. Based on our recent progress, we are confident we are moving in the right direction.”

Other DHS officials emphasized that if Congress passes immigration reform in the near future, they would have an electronic system that could accommodate any significant changes, including a surge in demand from immigrants seeking legal status.

Until then, immigrants and their lawyers say they will remain hugely frustrated by the government’s archaic, error-plagued system. Processing immigration applications now often involves shipping paper documents across the country, and delays are legend. A single missing or misplaced form can set back an approval by months.

“It’s shameful that they’ve been on this for a decade and haven’t been able to get a working system in place,’’ said Vic Goel, an immigration lawyer in Reston, Va., who has followed the computerization project as a liaison for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Online forms get pulled

When the electronic immigration system began in May 2012, it was hailed as “a significant milestone in our agency’s history” by the USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas, who is now the deputy secretary of homeland security.

The first form that went live was intended for foreigners who were in the United States on certain types of visas who wanted to renew their non-immigrant status.

But only a fraction of applicants ever used that form before the agency took it offline, after officials decided to abandon the initial technology and development method and move toward a cloud-based system. Some officials inside DHS said the system should never have been launched at all because of reports that it was suffering from so many technical errors.

The second form, released in 2013, didn’t fare much better. It was designed to allow a certain group of foreigners — those wanting to immigrate to the United States and invest in a business — to apply electronically. Only about 80 people used the online form, DHS officials said. More than 10,000 others opted for old-fashioned paper. It was also pulled.

The third form, which debuted last year, is the one that would allow permanent residents to renew or replace their green cards online. In nearly 200 cases, applicants did not receive their cards or had to wait up to a year, despite multiple requests, according to a June report from the USCIS ombudsman.

The agency also hoped to make it possible for immigrants to pay fees online. There are more than 40 kinds of filing fees that immigrants pay to the government with their applications. As of now, however, only one can be paid online — by those who immigrate to the United States as lawful permanent residents. And even this limited electronic payment system has encountered major problems, such as resistance from immigrants who have trouble because they may not have computers or bank accounts.

A series of government reports has skewered the online immigration system, named ELIS after Ellis Island, even after the old technology was scrapped and officials were scrambling to move to the new cloud-based approach. These studies have found that it is slow, confusing and inefficient for immigrants and government employees alike.

A report last year from the DHS inspector general’s office said it sometimes took up to 150 clicks for employees to navigate the system’s various complex features and open documents — and that the system lacked functions as basic as a usable search engine. Internal DHS evaluations have warned of “critical engineering uncertainties” and other difficulties.

“It’s incredibly slow to use the few forms they put online,’’ said Goel, the immigration lawyer. “Most immigration lawyers have concluded the system is half-baked.’’

‘It wasn’t going to work’

Government watchdogs have repeatedly blamed the mammoth problems on poor management by DHS, and in particular by the immigration agency.

When the project began, DHS was only two years old, cobbled together after the Sept. 11 attacks from myriad other government agencies, and the department was still reeling. “There was virtually no oversight back then,’’ a former federal official said. “DHS was like the Wild West on big acquisitions.”

The Government Accountability Office has blasted the immigration service for shoddy planning, saying the agency awarded the IBM contract “prior to having a full understanding of requirements and resources needed to execute the program.” As a result, basic planning documents were incomplete or unreliable, including cost estimates and schedules. The basic requirements for the project, the report said, were not completed until 2011 — nearly three years after the IBM contract was awarded.

IBM had as many as 500 people at one time working on the project. But the company and agency clashed. Agency officials, for their part, held IBM responsible for much of the subsequent failure, documents show.

The company’s initial approach proved especially controversial. Known as “Waterfall,” this approach involved developing the system in relatively long, cascading phases, resulting in a years-long wait for a final product. Current and former federal officials acknowledged in interviews that this method of carrying out IT projects was considered outdated by 2008. “The Waterfall method has not been successful for 40 years,” said a current federal official involved in the project, who was not an authorized spokesperson and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

An IBM spokesman declined to address the criticisms, saying only that the company’s work on Transformation concluded in May.

By 2012, the system’s fundamental flaws — including frequent computer crashes and bad software code — were apparent to officials involved with the project and, according to one of them, and it was clear that “it wasn’t going to work.”

But killing the project wasn’t really an option, according to officials involved at the time. President Obama was running for reelection and was intent on pushing an ambitious immigration reform program in his second term. A workable electronic system would be vital.

“There was incredible pressure over immigration reform,” a second former official said. “No one wanted to hear the system wasn’t going to work. It was like, ‘We got some points on the board, we can go back and fix it.’”

Delays and lost papers

Immigration reform never made it out of Congress, but it could resurface after the presidential election next year. If it does, and if it involves possible citizenship or legal status for the 11.3 million immigrants who are in the country illegally, the policy would flood the government with millions of complicated new applications.

“Oh, God help us,’’ said Harry Hopkins, a former immigration services official who worked on the Transformation project. “If there is immigration reform, they are going to be overwhelmed.’’

The project’s failures already have daily consequences for millions of immigrants who are in the country legally. Immigration lawyers say the current system leads to lost applications, months-long delays and errors that cause further delays. Immigrants miss deadlines for benefits, meaning they lose everything from jobs and mortgages to travel opportunities.

Luke Bellocchi, an immigration lawyer and former deputy ombudsman at Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he has handled at least 100 cases of lost applications in the past few years, mostly for green cards.

“No one knows where these applications are,” he said. “It’s an absolute nightmare.’’

Another concern is national security. DHS officials said they are confident that the current paper-based system is not putting the nation at risk. But others, like Palma Yanni, a D.C. immigration lawyer and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, are dubious.

“If there are some bad apples in there who should not get a green card, who are terrorists who want to do us harm, how on earth are they going to find these people if they’re sending mountains of paper immigration files all over the United States?’’ Yanni asked.