Al-Qaeda Obsessed With Recording Every Expense

At the sight of cars bearing the black al-Qaeda flag rushing towards his grocery store came in view, the manager thought he was about to get robbed, the Associated Press reported.

Rushing to lock his cash register, Mohamed Djitteye cowered behind the counter and waited. In a surprising twist of events, an al-Qaeda commander gently opened the grocery's glass door and asked for a pot of mustard. Then he asked for a receipt.

According to the AP, when a confused and fearful Djitteye did not react, the jihadist repeated his request. Could he please have a receipt for the $1.60 purchase? This incident in Northern Mali portrays an unusual preoccupation of al-Qaeda: their obsession with documenting the most minute of expenses.

In a building occupied by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu earlier this year, more than 100 receipts were found to have been left behind, the AP reported.

The extremists diligently tracked their cash flow, recording purchases as small as a single light bulb.

Written in pencil and colored pen on scraps of paper and Post-it notes, the tiny amounts consist of $1.80 for a bar of soap, $8 for a packet of macaroni, and $14 for a tube of super glue.

The accounting system on display in the documents found by The Associated Press is a mirror image of what researchers have discovered in other parts of the world where al-Qaeda operates, including Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.

Corporate workshop schedules, salary spreadsheets, philanthropy budgets, job applications, public relations advice and letters from the equivalent of a human resources division are also part of al-Qaeda's documents around the world, according to the AP.

"They have to have bookkeeping techniques because of the nature of the business they are in," said Brookings Institution fellow William McCants, a former adviser to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counter-terrorism. "They have so few ways to keep control of their operatives, to rein them in and make them do what they are supposed to do. They have to run it like a business."