Wikileaks releases 2.5m Syrian emails

Whistleblowing site Wikileaks has just published some 2.5-million emails from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names.

According to Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, the files are “embarrassing to Syria, but […] also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents.

“It helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it.”

The Syria Files, says Wikileaks, “shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy”, also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another.

The range of information covered by the leaked emails reportedly extends from the intimate correspondence of the most senior Baath party figures to records of financial transfers sent from Syrian ministries to other nations.

The scope of the leak — 2 434 899 emails from 678 752 addresses to 1 082 447 different recipients — means that it’s about eight times larger than the infamous Cablegate scandal.

Cablegate began in February 2010 when WikiLeaks began releasing classified cables that had been sent to the U.S. State Department by 274 of its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions around the world.

The emails were sent in a number of different languages including around 400 000 emails in Arabic and 68 000 in Russian.

The whistlebowing site says it has built a data-mining tool specifically to deal with the large number of emails in the leak.

It adds that stories concerning the content of the mails should start appearing the coming weeks.