Over the weekend, WikiLeaks released an email from an employee within the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) indicating that the OPCW “misrepresents the facts he and his colleagues discovered on the ground”. This email has since been used to call into question the impartiality and effectiveness of the OPCW’s conclusion about the alleged chemical weapon attack…
Italy’s arms industry is growing, and the country has already been one of the world’s biggest arms exporters for years. Since 1990, thousands of arms exports licences have been granted, with some of the biggest customers being Algeria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. The European Union (EU) has safeguards in place to prevent weapons…
With few exceptions, everything that appears in your browser can be downloaded and transformed into useable data formats, with many organisations or individuals maintain complex and publicly accessible datasets containing valuable information. Despite being publicly viewable, in many cases the underlying data is not able to be downloaded and further analysed. This guide will focus…
لقد أدى انتشار وسائل الإعلام الاجتماعي والهواتف الذكية في جميع أنحاء الشرق الأوسط إلى خلق قدر هائل من الوثائق المتاحة للجمهور حول النزاعات في المنطقة. سواء في شكل مقاطع فيديو أو صور و مقاطع من المعارك والاشتباكات إلى جرائم الحرب المحتملة,و يتم توثيق الكثير من هذه الاشياء بشكل روتيني وتحميلها إلى مواقع مختلفة مثل فيس…
The spread of social media and smartphones throughout the Middle East has created a truly enormous amount of publicly available documentation of conflicts in the region. Whether in the form of videos or photos, from combat footage to potential war crimes — a lot of things are routinely documented and uploaded to various sites like…
On April 7th 2018 reports began emerging of alleged chemical attacks on the city of Douma, in the rebel held pocket of Eastern Ghouta, Syria. Reports indicated that a significant number of people, including children, had been killed by these attacks. This report will assess and verify the open source information regarding these attacks, and…
On April 4, 2018 French media reported that the 72 year old Shaykh Bassam Ayachi was arrested in the north of France on March 27. The media portrayed him as “the oldest Belgian Jihadi”, as “the mentor of generations of Belgian Jihadi’s” and above all as “one of the main recruiters for Belgian foreign fighters who left for the war in Syria”. In 2012 Flemish newspaper De Standaard even called him “the personification of radical Islam in our country.” His actual story is a bit more nuanced however, and this brief article aims to separate the fiction from the facts.
Over the course of seven years of war, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has engaged in armed conflict against various opposition forces composed of domestic rebels and foreign volunteers, often equipped with light weapons. Given the sheer amount of open source information available related to these events, it is possible to track the military vehicle…
On March 16, 2018, at around 21:00 local time (UTC+2), an alleged Turkish airstrike hit the main hospital of the Kurdish-majority city of Afrin, in northwestern Syria, where Turkey and allied Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups are engaging in an offensive against the People’s Protection Units (Kurdish: Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG). The YPG and the…
Summary On April 15, 2017, an explosion rocked a convoy of buses carrying evacuees near Syria’s opposition-held Al-Rashideen leading to more than 100 deaths. The coaches were carrying evacuees from the besieged government-held towns of Fuaa and Kefraya in the Idlib governorate; Initial reports said that the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber. A…
