There was something very strange about the rockets that landed in Zamalka, a town south of the Syrian capital, shortly after two in the morning on August 21. There was no explosion. However, they passed through the walls of houses and began to release gases that proved deadly. Hundreds of people who were sleeping in the surrounding houses at the time were killed instantly and bloodlessly, as if they had been suffocated by invisible hands. A cloud of death had spread quietly and claimed hundreds of lives.
Shortly after dawn the next day, Muhammed al-Jazaeri, a 27-year-old engineer who had joined a coalition of activists aiming to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, felt the need to document what had happened. He found one of the rockets protruding from a house a mile from his home. Wanting to show the world the “real picture” of life in Syria, he used a handheld Sony camera to shoot a short video of the rubble before him. That same day, he uploaded the clip to a website that has become a hub for war watchers, YouTube. (Photo by mycatbirdseat.com)
Several hours later and 2,300 miles northwest of Leicester, England, a blogger named Eliot Higgins was watching al-Jazaeri’s video on his laptop. Higgins had been following events in Syria on Twitter, Google+, and about 600 Syrian accounts on YouTube. From his living room, Higgins simply wondered who was responsible for this act.
Higgins is 34 years old with a 2-year-old daughter and is unemployed. He had no formal training, knowledge or security clearance that would have given him access to classified documents. He could not speak or read Arabic. He had never set foot in the Middle East, and his only contact was a visit to his in-laws who live in Turkey.
For 18 months, Higgins had been following the Syria blogosphere, and specifically Brown Moses, which was the main source of information about the weapons being used in Syria’s deadly war. Using nothing more than an Asus laptop, he discovered from the data written on the rocket that the weapons were being imported into Syria from Iran. He was the first to identify the widely banned bombs used by Syrian forces. The New York Times, relying on his findings, was able to prove that Saudi Arabia had provided the weapons to Syria.
The revelation of the August 21 missile attack was instrumental in the world learning that it was indeed a chemical weapons attack, launched by Bashar al-Assad's own forces. This conclusion led to a diplomatic agreement under which the Syrian government would submit to international inspections and commit to destroying its chemical weapons stockpiles.
“I saw the UN get the Nobel Prize for Syria,” said one weapons expert, referring to the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, who did not want to be named because of his work with the international organization. “I think Eliot has done a lot more for Syria than the UN.”
The full article is available on the Huffington Post.
