As the international community searches for a place to destroy Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons, the Syrian regime continues to deny that it used them in a devastating attack on Ghouta, a Damascus suburb, this past August. Those denials have been widely challenged, in part owing to the research of Eliot Higgins, an unemployed British man who became a self-taught weapons expert and whose blog, Brown Moses, has become a hub of information about the Syrian civil war.

As Patrick Radden Keefe writes in a Profile of Higgins in this week’s magazine,

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.

After the Ghouta attack, Higgins focussed on identifying a rocket “whose tail was ringed by knife-like fins.” By piecing together bits of information from YouTube, still photographs, and crowd-sourced translation, Higgins assembled a case that the rockets were likely designed to deliver a chemical agent and that they had landed in Ghouta on the day of the attack. Later, he posted videos showing Assad forces launching rockets of nearly identical construction. His findings made it into a Human Rights Watch report about the attack and have helped shape the conversation about intervention in Syria. Following the Iraq War, Higgins believes that civilians demand incontrovertible evidence of weapons of mass destruction or war crimes. “They don’t want to be told it happened anymore,” Higgins said. “They want to see it.”

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