Beirut: Daesh has relaxed vetting procedures for foreign recruits and expanded training camps in a drive to boost its “Caliphate”, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

The group is said to have largely dropped security measures designed to weed out spies among overseas volunteers in order to swell its ranks.

“Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi [Daesh’s leader] has called for all Muslims to come to their land, so the process is much less stringent,” said Abu Ahmad, a Syrian living in neighbouring Turkey, who runs a safe house and helps funnel Islamist militants into the country. “Almost any Muslim who wants to travel now can. They want everyone to come.” Abu Ahmad, who spoke using a pseudonym, agreed to meet in a cafe in Urfa, a small town on the Turkish border, that is on the primary route for foreign fighters crossing into Syria.

For 18 months he has strived to protect foreigners in Turkey and helped them to cross to Syria. “A friend in Aleppo told me there was someone they needed to bring to Syria. He said they would be guests in the country. So I took them to my home when they arrived,” he said.

“The first ‘guest’ was a [militant] from Saudi Arabia. The second a Tunisian, and it went from there. Most of them are from the Gulf.”

Although he had not personally hosted Westerners, he said he had friends who had aided them. There had been “stringent checks” before he could help someone cross the border but that was no longer the case.

His account tallied with one given last year by a foreign fighter who described needing at least three references from members of a militant group and a full background check before being given the clearance to join up.

Since relaxing the regulations, the numbers of foreigners joining Daesh has increased, Ahmad said, despite the US air strikes against the militants’ positions in Syria and Iraq.

Abu Abdullah, a former bodyguard for Saddam Jamal, the “emir” of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, backed the reports. “Each day foreigners are joining more and more, from all over the world: Yemen, the Magreb and the West,” he said, also using a false name.

Charlie Winter, a researcher with the Quilliam Foundation, which monitors militant activity, said there had been a “lot of chatter” on forums about the relaxation of regulations. The manoeuvre may be designed to boost Daesh’s standing as the prime force in global Islamist militancy.

The group’s split with Al Qaida has caused division in militant ranks. Winter said: “They are trying to improve their image: to go from being a bunch of men too extreme even for Al Qaida to Islamist militants that are fighting the crusader enemy.”

He agreed the strategy appeared to be working. “It seems too that there are more people who are desperate to go to Syria,” he said.

Daesh has also boosted its domestic recruitment drive, expanding its training camps in Syria and Iraq and reportedly paying local men to get trained. A report by the Long War Journal has identified 46 training camps belonging to the Daesh, Jabhat Al Nusra (Al Qaida’s branch in Syria) and several other smaller hardline units. The group has identified the location of 34 camps in Syria and 12 in Iraq, mostly belonging to Daesh.

Abdullah, who fled from the group one month ago, said: “I saw a huge number of soldiers in training camps. Now they are paying locals to join. They know how to control people. At this time there are more Syrians in need of money.”

The defector spoke of militants’ efforts to indoctrinate the local population and focusing on children in particular. “They feed the youngsters lies. They tell them ‘We will attack Rome’ and ‘Today there was operation in the US’. None of this is true but they say it to seem all powerful. They are working to destroy a whole generation. The ideas they implant will be hard to remove.”