AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

Identifying and then killing Islamic State fighters was an important part of the work that Australian commando Nathan Knox and his police contacts were doing, but it was only the first of a two-step process. The second step was to retrieve and bio-enrol the bodies. This was often done deep in the night when resistance was less likely. Men such as Captain Ihab Yousef — one of Nathan Knox’s contacts, a young Sunni man who joined the police force after Al Qaeda in Iraq killed his father and two of his uncles — would drive to grid locations given to them by the strike cell and there they would extract or exhume the bodies of the Islamic State fighters who had been killed.

The bodies would be piled up in the back of a police utility vehicle and driven to Al-Asad Airbase in Anbar Province where they could be processed. This collection work was dangerous and gruesome, but important for the coalition allies. These bodies were not only potentially a good source of battlefield intelligence, but they were also one of the key links between Iraq and domestic intelligence-gathering operations across the world.

The bodies were received and processed by both US intelligence officers and the Australian commandos. As one of the Five Eyes