June 3, 2019
In early May 2019, it was reported that agricultural areas of central and northern Iraq were being set ablaze — allegedly by remaining pockets of fighters from the so-called Islamic State. The motive was said to have been punishment of farmers who refused to pay protection money to the terrorist organization. There is evidence that in…
March 15, 2019
During the monitoring of the ongoing situation in Syria and Iraq via open-access satellite imagery, a curious situation presented itself in early January at the Mosul Lake. A black sludge stream resembling an oil spill appeared in the northwest part of the lake. The sludge stream disappeared late January, only to show up again on…
September 11, 2018
Iraq is on fire. Since late June, media has reported on wildfires in northern parts of Iraqi Kurdistan among the border with Turkey, along the border with Iran in the northeast and in the southeast of Iraq at the Hawizeh marshes, bordering Iran. A hazardous cocktail of climate change-induced increased summer heat, water shortages, military…
September 5, 2018
By Nathan Ruser
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…
July 9, 2018
By Rao Komar
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…
May 17, 2017
In mid 2012, the European intelligence and security community was confronted with a sudden outflow of citizens traveling to Syria, and later to Iraq. Quickly after its violent escalation in 2011, the Syrian uprising seemed to attract large numbers of religiously motivated combatants from all over the world. The Netherlands was no exception as the…
May 5, 2017
A version of this article was also published on Airwars. The international Coalition fighting the so-called Islamic State (IS) has published dozens of videos purportedly showing airstrikes against targets of the group in Syria and Iraq through the video-sharing social medium YouTube. Bellingcat has crowdsourced the geolocation of these videos, and this article serves as an…
March 16, 2017
A’maq News Agency, a media outlet linked to the so-called Islamic State, has claimed that the United States used white phosphorous munitions in the ongoing Battle for Mosul on March 11, 2017. This claim was reiterated by two local sources, Salah al-Shorbagy and the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq, saying that white phosphorous was used in Mosul….
February 21, 2017
As the Mosul Operations slowly progress, a myriad of open-source information is emerging from both Ninawa province and other areas where intense fighting took place earlier indicating that the ongoing battle has left a disastrous environmental legacy on Iraq’s landscape. This could pose acute and chronic human health risks to Iraqi communities that are already…
January 9, 2017
This article was last updated on July 31, 2017, when a public map of all geolocated SVBIED attacks in and around Mosul was published by Twitter user @obretix. Mosul was captured by so-called Islamic State (IS) militants in June 2014. More than two years later, on October 16, 2016, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared…
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