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…
December 1, 2016
ISIS have successfully adopted a little known Al-Qa’eda / Al-Nusra tactic known as Inghimasi. In a switch from the suicide bombing terrorism of the 2000’s, Inghimasiyun deliberately aim to stay alive, killing their enemies with firearms before having the option to detonate their vests when overwhelmed Evidence the tactic has been exported to North Africa…
November 4, 2016
Last update: November 5 at 16:36 UTC. A car bomb parked in a street of the Al-Hurriyah district of Baghdad killed at least eight people and wounded 30 more on October 30, 2016. At least, that’s what media reports suggested. Security camera footage that emerged three days later painted a fundamentally different picture: people prepared to…
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