Since the latest update in December of last year, 28 individuals were added to our database of Belgian fighters in the current Syrian-Iraqi conflict. That brings our estimate to 591 people, including relatives who did not leave to fight themselves. 40 of these Belgian foreign fighters are converts to Islam, with a remarkably high share of autochthonous women.
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…
Since the April 4th 2017 chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun a number of individuals and organisations have attempted to promote narratives that promote the idea that the attack was a false flag. One prominent voice stands out among these individuals and organisations, that of Professor Theodore A. Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Professor Postol was…
In May 2013 Bellingcat’s predecessor, the Brown Moses Blog, published an analysis of the April 29th 2013 chemical attack on the town of Saraqib, Idlib. In light of information recently published by the French government about the attack this post revisit the earlier analysis with updated information.
Part I describes the basic behaviour and intended function of an air-delivered gravity bomb containing Sarin, designed along US/USSR cold war lines. When we left off in Part I, a well-crafted gravity bomb will have dispensed it’s Sarin broadly along this distribution:
Bellingcat exchanged information with Forensic Architecture and Human Rights Watch. Both of which carried out separate investigations into the attack. All multimedia information has been archived by the Syrian Archive. On March 16, 2017, around 18:55 local time, a United States (US) airstrike targeted the Sayidina Omar ibn al-Khattab mosque, where reportedly almost 300 people…
From eastern Aleppo to Raqqa to Mosul, the Islamic State (IS) appears to be losing ground on all sides in recent months. The same pattern holds true in southeastern Syria, a region that stretches from the Jordanian border to the city of Palmyra to the Euphrates river and only rarely features in reporting on the…
Part I: The Bomb, its contents, and their likely fate The recent chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun in Syria is alleged by witnesses to have been delivered by an air-dropped bomb. The purpose of this article is to systematically break down a Sarin bomb into its components and analyse what happens to them. This first part…
Last week, we published a survey of open source evidence concerning the alleged chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province. This article builds upon the information presented in that article by comparing the claims made by a variety of actors and sources, including the Pentagon, the Syrian Foreign Ministry, and aircraft spotters on the…
On Tuesday April 4th 2017, videos and images emerged from sources within Syria showing what is claimed to be a chemical weapon attack that targeted Al Sheikhun south of Idlib. Introduction Initial reports of the attack appeared on social media on the morning of Tuesday April 4th 2017. It was claimed that airstrikes in Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib,…
