A survey presented by Spiegel reveals that European companies are the ones that provide satellite Internet to ISIS fighters.

“It remains unclear whether the companies knowingly do so, but documents obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE show that they may very well know what’s going on. And the documents show that the companies could immediately cut off Islamic State’s Internet access without much effort”, Spiegel reports.

The ISIS purchase the equipment required for Internet access in the Hatay province, Turkey and as it is reported thousands of dishes have been installed in the region controlled by ISIS allowing users to access the Internet by satellite.

As Spiegel mentions many distribution firms are involved in the sales chain of the technologies required to have access to satellite Internet and at the beginning of this chain are the major European satellite operators, led by France’s Eutelsat, Great Britain’s Avanti Communications and Luxembourg’s SES.

Furthermore, among the most popular brands are Hughes by Avanti and, especially, Tooway by Eutelsat which has been in business for years offering almost complete global coverage with its satellites.

As it is reported, some information gets lost through the long distribution chain, since when a purchase is made in Antakya or in a Syrian city, it’s not possible to determine which company exported the goods from Europe to Turkey, the companies say.

“But is that true?”, Spiegel wanders. The distribution companies and the operators are able to determine where the equipment is supplied, because when the satellite dishes are installed and Internet access is configured, users must provide their GPS coordinates. If the information provided is wrong, then customers won’t be able to access the Internet or end up with poor connections,

According to documents and GPS data obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE from 2014 and 2015, it is clearly indicated that satellite dishes were located in places which are under Islamic State control.