Contributors
Staff
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.
View Full profileAric 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.
View Full profileNick 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
View Full profileNarine 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
View Full profileGiancarlo 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
View Full profileAiganysh is a Bellingcat researcher from Kyrgyzstan. She is particularly interested in corruption in Central Asia, conspiracies in Europe and tool development.
View Full profileFoeke 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
View Full profileMaxim 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.
View Full profileAnnique 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.
View Full profileMichael 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.
View Full profileCarlos 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
View Full profileCharlotte 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
View Full profileLogan 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.
View Full profileJohanna 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
View Full profileContributors
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.
View Full profileChristiaan 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).
View Full profileWim 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
View Full profileChris Biggers is a public and private sector consultant based in Washington, D.C.
View Full profileDan 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
View Full profileRobert 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
View Full profileSyrianArchive.org is a open source platform that collects, curates, verifies, and preserves visual documentation of human rights violations in #Syria | Twitter: @syrian_archive
View Full profileOngoing monitoring and investigative effort into anti-equality (anti-LGBT, choice, feminist, etc.) and far-right movements in central and eastern Europe.
View Full profileJustin 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.
View Full profileMichael 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.
View Full profileThe 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
View Full profileOleksiy 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
View Full profileBenjamin 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
View Full profileVeli-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.
View Full profileHistorian, Arabist and Islamicist working as an independent researcher. Focus on Jihad in Syria and Iraq, Jabhat an-Nusra, ISIS and foreign fighters.
View Full profileEric 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
View Full profileAlberto 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
View Full profileAlexander McKeever is an independent researcher and MA student at CUNY GC’s Middle Eastern Studies program. He can be found on Twitter @AKMcKeever.
View Full profileIndependent researcher following the Syrian Civil War using open source research.
View Full profileMasis 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
View Full profileChristo 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.
View Full profileAdam 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.
View Full profileBellingcat's Investigative Tech Team develops tools for open source investigations and explores tech-focused research techniques.
View Full profileAnti-Tank Guided Missile and faction tracker focusing on the Syrian Civil War
View Full profileJohn 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.
View Full profileCollin 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.
View Full profileBrenna Smith is a researcher specializing in investigating disinformation and the illicit use of cryptocurrencies.
View Full profileJacob 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.
View Full profile35-year-old Czech network engineer interested in military history, space and electric cars.
View Full profileKhalil 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
View Full profileLaurence 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
View Full profileShane 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).
View Full profileAbigail W. Xavier (a pseudonym) is a working data scientist. She has an academic background in political theory and data science.
View Full profileFrederic is a security researcher working on encrypted messaging and censorship resistance.
View Full profileXu 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
View Full profileJessica Purkiss works for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on their Shadow Wars team. She predominantly investigates US military operations in Afghanistan.
View Full profileSocial sciences student, RuNet Echo contributor and independent researcher focusing on political use of the internet and social media.
View Full profileThe 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
View Full profileJett 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
View Full profileAmnesty International Crisis Response, and founder and editor of Citizen Evidence Lab.
View Full profileLeone 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
View Full profileGregory 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
View Full profileNathan 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.
View Full profileThe 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.
View Full profileLine of Actual Control (@LOActualControl on Twitter) is a blog covering global affairs through open source research
View Full profileThomas is a datajournalist and art director for Dutch public broadcaster KRO-NCRV.
View Full profileNathan Ruser is an author at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and focuses on Middle Eastern Affairs and Transnational Terrorism.
View Full profileRao Komar solves challenges for corporations, advocacy, and political organizations by developing analytical and software products using Python, data science, artificial intelligence, and network science.
View Full profileMarwan 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
View Full profileTimm 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.
View Full profileKiril 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
View Full profileRC writes a blog on open source stories from around the world at Line of Actual Control (@LOActualControl)
View Full profileCheryl 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
View Full profileHannah 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
View Full profileReinier 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
View Full profileAman 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
View Full profileHenk 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
View Full profileCameron 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
View Full profileEdward 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.
View Full profileMelissa 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
View Full profileThe #ItalianArms research team contributors include: Giorgio Beretta, Lorenzo Bodrero, Francesca Costantini, Leone Hadavi, Ludo Hekman, Bas Mesters, Alessandro Sangalli, Daniel Sidoli, and Carlo Tombola.
View Full profileOllie is a Lecturer in Geocomputation at University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (@oballinger).
View Full profileRoss 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
View Full profileElise 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.
View Full profileMichael Cruickshank is an Australian freelance conflict journalist currently based in Berlin, specialising in the OSINT, defense, the (mis)use of technology, and climate conflicts
View Full profileArslon Xudosi is a researcher focused on Syrian Turkmens, foreign fighters, and arms research in Syria and the surrounding area.
View Full profileChristiaan Triebert is a journalist on the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times and a former staff member of Bellingcat.
View Full profileKeith 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
View Full profileEmmi Bevensee is a data scientist and researcher of complexity, the far-right, and disinformation. Twitter: @emmibevensee.
View Full profileChristian 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
View Full profileAaron 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
View Full profileEthan 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
View Full profileMorgan 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
View Full profileBashar 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.
View Full profileJason 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
View Full profilePeter 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
View Full profilePieter is a former member of the Bellingcat Investigation Team. He has a background in History. Twitter: @hspvn
View Full profileWARNING: 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
View Full profileJonathan Krohn is a Middle East-based writer currently focused on Iraq, Kurdistan, and the rise of the Islamic State.
View Full profileAliaume 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
View Full profileNour 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.
View Full profile"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,
View Full profileKarl 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.
View Full profileAndrew 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.
View Full profileKathrin Yaromich is a researcher and a former student at the University of New York in Prague, Czech Republic.
View Full profileOz 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.
View Full profileSean’s work for Bellingcat is focused on the use of artillery systems during the Ukrainian conflict.
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