Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks said on Thursday it had begun publishing more than 2.4 million e-mails from Syrian officials, government ministries and companies dating from August 2006 to March 2012.
The documents to be released originate from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture, Wikileaks said.
"The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was quoted as saying in a statement published on the website.
The archive “helps us not merely to criticize 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,” he added.
The leaked documents include around 400,000 emails in Arabic and 68,000 emails in Russian, Wikileaks said.
It stressed that “it is not possible to verify every single email at once,” adding, however, “We are statistically confident that the vast majority of the data are what they purport to be.”
All initial stories to be published have been verified, it added.
Assange has been fighting extradition from Britain, where he was arrested in 2010 at the request of Swedish authorities on rape and sex crime allegations.
He was released on bail and has taken refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. He has rejected a British police order to surrender and has applied for asylum in Ecuador.
