Eliot Higgins, at home in England. He monitors hundreds of videos from Syria a day. Photograph by James Day

As rockets fell in Syria, Eliot Higgins was asleep at his house twenty-three hundred miles away, in Leicester, England. He woke a few hours later, roused his toddler daughter, Ela, and padded downstairs to make her porridge. It was August 21st, and it had been ten months since Higgins was laid off from his job as an administrator at a nonprofit providing housing for asylum seekers. His days now consisted of looking after Ela and writing blog posts. As he made breakfast, he checked Twitter on his phone, and noticed reports of a possible chemical-weapons attack in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Similar reports had come out of Syria in recent months, but they had been difficult to verify. This time, the casualty estimates were in the hundreds. He opened his laptop and went on YouTube, where witnesses to previous incidents had uploaded video evidence. There were already dozens of videos from Ghouta, and the severity and scale of the destruction shocked Higgins: young children convulsing, their open mouths slick with foam; stiff, unbloodied corpses lined up in rows on hospital floors.

“Immediately, I gathered as much information as possible,” Higgins told me recently. Online, Higgins is known as Brown Moses, and, as Ela played, he assembled videos from Ghouta, preparing to post them on the Brown Moses Blog. Unlike the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, the war in Syria has not produced a huge body of journalism by international reporters on the ground. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Syria is currently the most dangerous dateline in the world; the regime of Bashar al-Assad has effectively banned the international press. More than fifty reporters have been killed while covering the conflict, and dozens more are missing, presumably detained by the authorities. Yet Syrians have managed to access the Internet, and all the factions in the ongoing civil war have uploaded videos onto YouTube. They film their own military offensives and release propagandistic recruitment videos. They document civilian casualties and the ritualized speeches of regime officials who have defected to the opposition. They present evidence of war crimes, including torture, mutilations, and executions. And they show weaponry: rifles, bombs, and rockets.

Although Higgins has never been to Syria, and until recently had no connection to the country, he has become perhaps the foremost expert on the munitions used in the war. On YouTube, he scans as many as three hundred new videos a day, with the patience of an ornithologist. Even when a rocket has largely been destroyed, he can often identify it by whatever scraps survive. When he doesn’t recognize a weapon, he researches it, soliciting information from his many followers on Facebook and Twitter. In June, 2012, he revealed on his blog that the Free Syrian Army, the leading armed opposition group, had obtained anti-aircraft guns. The next month, he presented video evidence that Assad’s regime had deployed cluster bombs. “It’s very incongruous, this high-intensity conflict being monitored by a guy in Leicester,” Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer in London, told me. “He’s probably broken more stories than most journalists do in a career.”

The Brown Moses Blog began as an eclectic collection of videos from Syria, including everything from explosions to street protests. But Higgins doesn’t speak Arabic, so he focussed on something purely visual: documenting weaponry. When rebel fighters brandished machine guns for the camera, or when members of Assad’s National Defense Force showed off weapons that they had captured from a rebel ammunition dump, he paused the video and scrutinized the armaments. After an attack, he studied the shell casings and spent munitions that littered the ground—the flame-scarred detritus of war. Gradually, the blog developed a following, even though nobody knew who Brown Moses was. It was a curious name, and his avatar—the twisted face of a screaming pope, from a Francis Bacon painting—only deepened the mystery. Kristyan Benedict, the campaign manager of Amnesty International, told me that the organization has staff members monitoring videos from Syria, but said of Higgins, “He just gets there quicker than a lot of established research outlets have been able to.”

By following Brown Moses, you could track the progress of the Syrian rebels, as they improvised weapons, perfected roadside bombs, and eventually captured tanks and anti-aircraft cannons. Likewise, you could observe the gradual tactical escalation of Assad’s forces, which implied a strategic vulnerability that the regime would never confirm otherwise.

The day of the Ghouta attack, Higgins found several photographs of the munitions that had purportedly delivered the chemical agent. Rockets with explosive payloads usually detonate on contact, but the Ghouta rockets had landed more or less intact before, presumably, dispersing a deadly gas. He noticed several photographs of a narrow cylinder whose tail was ringed by knife-like fins. In one image, the munition jutted out of a rutted field at an angle. The strange-looking weapon was unknown to munitions experts, but Higgins had seen it before. In January, it had made a “first appearance,” in Daraya, a suburb southwest of Damascus. Higgins had posted a clip of it sticking out of the ground. The remains of a similar rocket had been filmed in Adra, a neighborhood in the northeast of Damascus, where multiple chemical attacks had allegedly occurred. Higgins had blogged about the weapon and had posted a video from Adra of a dog lying on a dusty street, its hind legs twitching uncontrollably. When Higgins realized that the same weapon had been deployed in Ghouta, he announced his finding on his blog: “In all cases, these are munitions that the opposition has claimed the government has used.” He didn’t know what the rocket’s payload was, or how it was launched. But, he wrote, identifying the weapon might be a key to understanding the alleged chemical attacks.

When I visited Higgins recently at his home, he intercepted me at the front door before I could ring the bell. “My daughter’s just fallen asleep,” he whispered. He ushered me into the small front room, which doubles as his daughter’s playroom and his office, and sat down on a beige couch, where he does most of his blogging. The lace curtains had a tulip pattern. Toys were stacked against one wall. A gold foil balloon, a remnant from Ela’s birthday, floated on the ceiling.

“My background was in finance and admin,” Higgins told me. “I’m completely self-taught, really.” He is thirty-four years old, and has a schoolboyish face, a thatch of fluffy brown hair, and rectangular glasses. His wife, Nuray, a slender, dark-haired woman, got ready to leave for her job at the post office. “It’s just something I sort of fell into,” Higgins said, opening his laptop to show me videos that he had studied that morning.

Nuray is from Turkey, and after their daughter was born, in October, 2011, they took a family vacation to Istanbul, so that Ela could spend some time with her grandparents. While in Turkey, Higgins decided to start a blog. For a decade, he had worked dull administrative jobs, and couldn’t mask his boredom. “Until recently, I was extremely shy,” he told me. His mother, Elizabeth, recalled that Higgins, even as a child, found it hard to concentrate on things he wasn’t passionate about. “But when he developed an interest, nothing would dissuade him,” she said. He never finished college, dropping out of the Southampton Institute of Higher Education. When I asked what he studied there, he said, “Media . . . I think.” But he had always been active on the Internet. He took an obsessive interest in online role-player games, like World of Warcraft, and after work he played them for five or six hours at a stretch. When he met Nuray, who had come to England as an au pair, Higgins concluded that his gaming habit was not “compatible with marriage,” and quit. But he continued to indulge in another social-yet-antisocial pastime: online commenting. He was an active member of a discussion forum called Something Awful. An admirer of Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, he generally took a progressive view on foreign policy, and compulsively read the Web site of the Guardian, often being the first to comment on articles relating to politics in the Middle East. He engaged in endless debate with people he knew only as screen names. He linked to videos from Libya and Syria, occasionally inflaming other commenters by posting gruesome footage. When people accused him of heartlessness or prurience, he responded that the crimes of war must be documented and disseminated. He selected his pseudonym more than a decade ago, essentially at random, when a discussion forum requested a handle while he was listening to the Frank Zappa song “Brown Moses.” The screaming-pope avatar was similarly arbitrary, he told me: “But now that’s become my trademark.”