Contributors

Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat and the Brown Moses Blog. Eliot focuses on the weapons used in the conflict in Syria, and open source investigation tools and techniques.

Aric Toler was a researcher and trainer at Bellingcat from 2015 to 2023, and the organisation's first Director of Training & Research. He is currently a reporter at the New York Times.

Nick is an ex-British Army officer and open source analyst. He has a special interest in the conflicts in Syria, as well as social media, civil society, intelligence and security. Contact via Twitter: @N_Waters89

Giancarlo is the Director for Research and Training at Bellingcat. He has a PhD from the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto, where his research focused on non-state actors and antigovernmental protests in Venezue

Narine is a Yerevan-based journalist/translator who focuses on social, economic, human rights and political issues in Armenia and the South Caucasus. Prior to joining Bellingcat, she worked with a group of independent journalists, seeking to provide

Aiganysh is a Bellingcat researcher from Kyrgyzstan. She is particularly interested in corruption in Central Asia, conspiracies in Europe and tool development.

Foeke Postma works as a researcher and trainer at Bellingcat. He has a background in conflict analysis and resolution, and is particularly interested in military, environmental, and LGBT+ issues. Twitter: @foekepostma

Maxim Edwards was an editor at Bellingcat from 2020 to 2024. His work as a journalist has focused on central and eastern European politics, nationalism and migration. He previously worked at openDemocracy (oDR), OCCRP and GlobalVoices.

Annique Mossou is a trainer and researcher for Bellingcat. Previously she was part of an OSINT-team of the Dutch National Police, where she specialised in online jihadist propaganda.

Michael Colborne is a journalist and researcher at Bellingcat; he leads Bellingcat Monitoring, our project to research and monitor the far-right in central and eastern Europe. He tweets at @ColborneMichael.

Logan Williams is Bellingcat's technology officer and a senior data scientist and researcher on Bellingcat's Investigative Tech Team. He has a background in cartography, data visualisation, optics and signal processing.

Carlos Gonzales is a researcher and trainer at Bellingcat. Carlos fuses his engineering background with digital forensics. He specialises in the analysis of photographs, videos, satellite imagery, social media posts, timelines and 3D scene recons

Charlotte Godart is an investigator and trainer for Bellingcat. Before working at Bellingcat, she was a researcher and team manager at the Investigations Lab within the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, her alma mater. During that time, she taught

Johanna Wild is an open source researcher at the intersection of investigative research, tool development and journalism innovation. She was a 2024 Nieman-Berkman Klein Fellow and is currently an Affiliate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Socie

Ross Higgins is an investigator and trainer at Bellingcat.

The Bellingcat Investigation Team is an award winning group of volunteers and full time investigators who make up the core of the Bellingcat's investigative efforts.

Christiaan Triebert has investigated for Bellingcat since 2015 and runs several of Bellingcat's workshops for journalists and researchers across the world. Contact via email (christiaantriebert@bellingcat.com) or Twitter (@trbrtc).

Chris Biggers is a public and private sector consultant based in Washington, D.C.

Wim Zwijnenburg is a Humanitarian Disarmament Project Leader for PAX.  He works on conflict and environment related issues in the Middle East, the use and proliferation of emerging military technologies and arms trade @wammezz

Dan is the managing director of Strongpoint Security Ltd, and lives and works in London, UK. He has three decades years experience in CBRN response, security, and antiterrorism. He's held positions in the US Army, the US Department of Defense, the W

Robert Evans has worked as a conflict journalist in Iraq and Ukraine and reported extensively on far-right extremist groups in the United States. He's particularly interested in the ways terrorist groups recruit, radicalize and communicate through th

SyrianArchive.org is a open source platform that collects, curates, verifies, and preserves visual documentation of human rights violations in #Syria | Twitter: @syrian_archive

Ongoing monitoring and investigative effort into anti-equality (anti-LGBT, choice, feminist, etc.) and far-right movements in central and eastern Europe.

Justin Seitz is Canadian security consultant and author of two computer hacking books from No Starch Press. He blogs at AutomatingOSINT.com and can be found on Twitter @jms_dot_py.

Michael Sheldon is a researcher for Bellingcat. He has a background in open source research and verification on the conflict in the Donbas. Prior to joining Bellingcat, Michael worked at the DFRLab.

Oleksiy is a DC-based journalist focusing on Ukraine and specific issues surrounding the country, such as LGBT and women's rights. In early 2017, he dug deeper into a widely distributed Ukraine-related report by CrowdStrike, an American cyber securit

The Yemen Project will bring to light critical details about the conflict in Yemen. We aim produce verified material viable for court cases, aiding advocacy groups with reliable information, and working with other media organisations that wish to cov

Veli-Pekka is a doctoral student at Finnish National Defence University, researching social media and open source intelligence. He has a long background in the technology industry, more recently focusing on defense research.

Benjamin Strick is a digital investigator with a background in law, military and technology and is the Director of Investigations for the Centre for Information Resilience. He specialises in open source intelligence (OSINT), satellite imagery, influe

Historian, Arabist and Islamicist working as an independent researcher. Focus on Jihad in Syria and Iraq, Jabhat an-Nusra, ISIS and foreign fighters.

Eric Woods is freelance journalist and researcher who focuses on issues of illicit weapons proliferation, non-state actor dynamics, and access to public education. He can be reached via Twitter @Er_Woods

Alberto Fittarelli is a researcher who specializes in global conflicts, and their reverberations online. Historian by background, techie by experience. Passionate with forecasting "single points of failure" in the modern world. On Twitter at @albefit

Alexander McKeever is an independent researcher and MA student at CUNY GC’s Middle Eastern Studies program. He can be found on Twitter @AKMcKeever.

Independent researcher following the Syrian Civil War using open source research.

Masis Ingilizian is a researcher at the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He was previously a regular contributor for the publication IMINT Analysis edited by Sean O’Connor. His research focuses on the Caucasus, Iran and Russia

Jacob is a graduate of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Jacob’s research focuses are terrorism and counterterrorism policy, with an emphasis on East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

35-year-old Czech network engineer interested in military history, space and electric cars.

Christo Grozev was the Lead Russia Researcher at Bellingcat until February 2023. His investigations into the identity of the suspects in the 2018 Novichok poisonings in the UK earned him and his team the European Prize for Investigative Journalism.

Adam Rawnsley is a Philadelphia-based reporter covering technology and national security. He co-authors FP’s Situation Report newsletter and has written for The Daily Beast, Wired, and War Is Boring. You can follow him on Twitter at @arawnsley.

Bellingcat's Investigative Tech Team develops tools for open source investigations and explores tech-focused research techniques.

Anti-Tank Guided Missile and faction tracker focusing on the Syrian Civil War

John Arterbury is a graduate student at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies, where he focuses on terrorism and substate violence. He worked previously as a freelance journalist in Southeast Asia. You can follow him @JohnArterbury.

Collin Anderson is a Washington D.C.-based researcher focused on surveillance and censorship on the Internet with an emphasis on countries that restrict the free flow of information, primarily in the Middle East.

Brenna Smith is a researcher specializing in investigating disinformation and the illicit use of cryptocurrencies.

Aman is an undergraduate student at Davidson College studying Political Science and Arabic. At Davidson, Aman focuses on political Islam and substate actors in the Middle East and North Africa regions. Follow him @PresidentMadan to keep up with his w

Henk van Ess is an assessor of Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network and is obsessed by finding stories in (big) data. He was previously a freelance trainer for Bellingcat. His specialisations include social media and data journalism. As an a

Cameron Colquhoun is the Managing Director of Neon Century, a corporate intelligence consultancy based in London who apply cutting-edge open-source intelligence capabilities to conduct ethical investigations for our clients around geopolitical, comme

Edward Tian is a computer science and journalism student at Princeton University. He previously worked at a tech company in Kenya, and has interests in the MENA region, and refugee and asylum law, particularly in the U.S. and Canada.

Melissa Hanham is a Senior Research Associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS). She supports CNS' research by investigating new techniques in open source analysis; incorporating imagery, remote sensing data, large data se

The #ItalianArms research team contributors include: Giorgio Beretta, Lorenzo Bodrero, Francesca Costantini, Leone Hadavi, Ludo Hekman, Bas Mesters, Alessandro Sangalli, Daniel Sidoli, and Carlo Tombola.

Ollie is a Lecturer in Geocomputation at University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (@oballinger).

Ross Dayton holds a Masters of Arts in Global Affairs specializing in Globalization and Security from Florida International University. Ross studies international politics, conflict, and terrorism in Latin America, MENA, and Europe. For his Master's

Elise Thomas is a freelance journalist and OSINT Analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and others.

Michael Cruickshank is an Australian freelance conflict journalist currently based in Berlin, specialising in the OSINT, defense, the (mis)use of technology, and climate conflicts

Arslon Xudosi is a researcher focused on Syrian Turkmens, foreign fighters, and arms research in Syria and the surrounding area.

Christiaan Triebert is a journalist on the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times and a former staff member of Bellingcat.

Keith is an Affiliated Faculty member at George Mason University. He received his B.S. in Physics from Texas A&M and his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the Johns Hopkins University. He was on the Chemistry Faculty at the University of Wisconsin before serv

Emmi Bevensee is a data scientist and researcher of complexity, the far-right, and disinformation. Twitter: @emmibevensee.

Khalil Dewan is an independent consultant on Middle East and North Africa country risk. His work focuses on the conflict in Yemen and the Qatar-Gulf crisis with a special interest in conflict analysis, political, security and violent risk. Contact vi

Laurence Bindner is the former Director of Development of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism (CAT) in Paris. Her work covers analysis in terrorism financing (see ISIS financing), the links between terrorism financing and illicit trade and the q

Shane Burley is a journalist and the author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press 2017) and Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021).

Abigail W. Xavier (a pseudonym) is a working data scientist. She has an academic background in political theory and data science.

Frederic is a security researcher working on encrypted messaging and censorship resistance.

Xu majored in German language, and has worked for newspapers under the Chinese Communist Party before moving on to foreign newspapers' Beijing offices. He is now a member of a Chinese think tank called Modern National Defense and Security Research Ce

Jessica Purkiss works for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on their Shadow Wars team. She predominantly investigates US military operations in Afghanistan.

Social sciences student, RuNet Echo contributor and independent researcher focusing on political use of the internet and social media.

The author graduated in 2015. He has an M.A. degree in History and Cultural Studies. His main interest centers on the Christian militias fighting in Syria. You can follow him on Twitter: @shell_blog

Jett Goldsmith is a writer and analyst from Denver, Colorado. He formerly co-founded the investigative reporting and geopolitical analysis outlet Conflict News, and writes at length on Ba'athist state structures and various actors within the Syrian c

Amnesty International Crisis Response, and founder and editor of Citizen Evidence Lab.

Leone Hadavi is an open source investigator and analyst. He has an MA in War and Security Studies and an LLM in International Humanitarian Law, International Criminal Law of Armed Conflict. He worked as an intern analyst at the International Criminal

Gregory Waters is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. He researches conflicts and political transitions in the MENA region, primarily using open source information. His current research focuses on the economic and human losses in go

Nathan Patin is a Washington, D.C.-based independent researcher and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He focuses on information operations, infrastructure hunting, and the Middle East.

The Q Origins Project (@QOrigins on Twitter) examines the earliest days of QAnon in its original context, highlighting QAnon's roots in, and relationship to, 4chan culture.

Line of Actual Control (@LOActualControl on Twitter) is a blog covering global affairs through open source research

Thomas is a datajournalist and art director for Dutch public broadcaster KRO-NCRV.

Nathan Ruser is an author at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and focuses on Middle Eastern Affairs and Transnational Terrorism.

Rao Komar solves challenges for corporations, advocacy, and political organizations by developing analytical and software products using Python, data science, artificial intelligence, and network science.

Marwan Khoury is a forensic scientist who has submitted his PhD thesis on the effects of fire and explosions on forensic DNA to the University of Leicester. He studied in the UK and in Switzerland and trained with Geneva's Judicial Police in the Tech

Timm Allen is a freelance 3D graphic artist and lives in Berlin (Germany). His focus is on the image and video analysis and creating new methods of analysis.

Kiril Avramov and Ruslan Trad are the team behind the Borderline Watch Project. Kiril is a post-doctoral fellow at the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Ruslan is a freelance journalist and analyst with over te

RC writes a blog on open source stories from around the world at Line of Actual Control (@LOActualControl)

Cheryl Rofer writes scientific and political commentary. She was a chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 35 years. She regularly provides background information to reporters for major publications and has been quoted in the New York Times

Hannah Ellis is currently a research assistant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and formerly the Team Lead for Syria Investigations at the Open Source Investigations Lab in the Human Rights Center at Boalt Law

Reinier is a junior analyst at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. While holding a dual degree in International Relations and Crisis & Security Management, he has conducted research on Dutch jihadist foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, combining

Karl Morand produces the Middle East Week podcast in Amman, Jordan, where he is currently studying Arabic. He has a degree from Fordham University in international studies (Middle East focus) and a minor in economics.

Andrew Haggard is the founder of the Korean Defense website. He's fascinated by all-things military and defense-related with a particular interest in South Asia and the Korean peninsula.

Kathrin Yaromich is a researcher and a former student at the University of New York in Prague, Czech Republic.

Oz Katerji is a freelance writer and filmmaker currently based in London, United Kingdom. He studied English at Manchester University and quickly began covering geopolitical affairs with an eye trained squarely on the Middle East.

Sean’s work for Bellingcat is focused on the use of artillery systems during the Ukrainian conflict.

Will Horner is completing a Masters in Political Theory at UCL

Christian Borys is a Canadian journalist who has worked with Vice, The Guardian, Macleans and others. He is currently based in Ukraine and can be found on twitter @itsborys

Aaron Stein is an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He is also the nonproliferation program manager at the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul, where he works on security and proliferation issues

Ethan Rosen is a geopolitical researcher and analyst for China Six. His research focuses on the changing geopolitical situation between the Middle East and The Pacific. He is also the author of "The Bear, The Dragon, and the AK-47: How China, the Uni

Morgan Carlston has a Masters in Middle Eastern History from Tel Aviv University, and lived in Tel Aviv from 2010 to 2012, including during the 2012 conflict when Iron Dome gained international recognition. He blogs at http://persophilia.blogspot.com

Bashar Deeb Is an open source investigative journalist who works with Lighthouse Reports. He previously worked as a freelancer with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and was part of the research team in the #ItalianArms project.

Jason Wilson is an investigative journalist who tracks the political right and extremist movements. Earlier in 2020, he revealed the identity of international neo-nazi network, The Base, using open source investigative methods. Along with his reporti

Peter Jukes is an award winning screenwriter and dramatist, who published The Fall of the House of Murdoch. He has since written extensively for The Daily Beast, Newsweek, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Prospect Magazine and other publications

You can follow Garrison Davis at @Hungrybowtie on Twitter

Pieter is a former member of the Bellingcat Investigation Team. He has a background in History. Twitter: @hspvn

WARNING: SOMEONE IS USING THIS PERSON'S NAME IN A SCAM. Alexandra Raine does not work for Bellingcat. If someone claiming to be Alexandra contacts you, do not respond to them and let us know by writing to contact@bellingcat.com. Bio: Alexandra is a t

Jonathan Krohn is a Middle East-based writer currently focused on Iraq, Kurdistan, and the rise of the Islamic State.

Aliaume Leroy is an open source investigative journalist with the Africa Investigations unit of BBC World Service. At Bellingcat, he concentrates his research on Africa and Latin America. Contact via Twitter @Yaolri or email aleroy@bellingcat.com

Nour Bakr is a Middle East analyst with a focus on international relations, and Western foreign policy in the region. He has previously worked at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on the EU, and Syria departments.

Max Aliapoulios is a cybersecurity researcher. Twitter: @maxzzze

"Type 63: A Collection of Musings on Middle East Conflict" is the personal page of a Middle East / North Africa news and culture enthusiast, focused on non-state actors and how they wage war. The author is a 29 year old former US Marine infantryman,