Rocket Man: Some Government-Held Firing Spot or Other

What the "Rocket Man" Wants us to See in Ghouta: Some Government-Held Firing Spot or Other

August 11, 2021

(rough, incomplete)

here a fuller overview of the different ways Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins is well-known for linking the 2013 Ghouta sarin attack to the Syrian government, as related again in his recent book We Are Bellingcat. Citing this, supporter Idrees Ahmad praise how Higgins "replicated the U.N. mission’s most significant finding" that the Volcano rockets used were fired from "the Republican Guard base on Mount Qasioun," about 10km west of the stricken area. (NewLines, 23/02/21) This never was their finding exactly, but the given heading 285° points from the measured impact to about there (as shown, with Wikimapia labels) 

This never was Higgins' strong point in blaming Damascus for the attack, but he did try to use rocket trajectories. He has generally deferred to this reported angle, even as his own visual, open-source efforts simply had to disagree, always pointing further north. Here I will compile every area he has suggested based on actual evidence over the years, and show how none of them remotely matches this. We could call Mt. Qasioun spot 0 and count from there.

Spot 1) 6-8km north, 155 Brigade: 26/08/2013: Brown Moses Blog: 5 days after the attack, based on the first visually located rocket #197, "field" bent forward at an angle, that angle going unnoticed forever, it seemed the rocket was flying almost due south. So it seemed - to everyone, "the munition was fired from the north" as he explains with no more specific measure, but finds "6-8km away you'll find a number of military installations, connected by a 2km road to the 155th Brigade missile base. In one version of events, the Syrian National Coalition has claimed the rockets were launched from bases housing the 155th brigade." At right: my own quick tracing from about the field impact to 7.4km. Various bases, roads, a quarry fill the area - anywhere in there could suffice to launch rockets capable of flying 6-8km to land where they did. But note that everything south of there - from at least 5km and down - was all opposition-held.

https://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/08/finding-exact-location-of-alleged.html

Interlude: Limits set, directions disputed: Then "Who Attacked Ghouta," the Lloyd and Postol team, and others established a revised range - not the 9-10km or 6-8km needed for the above, but a mere 2km to maybe 2.5km max range. Higgins had accepted this by late November, 2013, and pretty much everyone did by early 2014. 2-3km to the north was all opposition turf. Higgins became less interested in looking north for a long time.

To him and others, trajectory clues remained confused with the north indication and increasingly NW,  but not quite  the UN-OPCW's "northwest" or basically west.  North was seen as implicating the rebels, and it seems like any kind of NW was ambiguous or likely to blame government forces. There was an Air Force intelligence headquarters  known of that way only 3km or so, and a besieged Tohme checkpoint only half that distance out. (Chris Kabusk asked about the significance of a pretty northerly spot: "I meant that suspected launcher sites are most likely to be spotted in the north, not NW, we got them mapped wrong..." (idea: north = rebels, NW = gov and/or what the UN said). As Higgins hastened to add "It's still possible there's multiple launch sites" - though he usually seems to think of a singular direction from a singular area, and mainly just remained confused what direction it would be. 

A simultaneous development adding to this was a newly-captured "strip" of army control, sized-up from tons of video evidence and some reports, with Higgin and more credible participants all in general agreement. Higgins put forth this green-shaded area of army control on the night of August 20/21. Charles Wood always contested the corner west of that southern bit of highway as only taken later. He's probably right, but otherwise it's pretty well agreed. This flanks the stricken area to the northwest, about where the rockets seemed to originate, but maybe past that new maximum range. I'll be tracing in this frontline in white in images below. 

Naturally, Higgins took that part loosely, usually as if 2km was the minimum distance the rockets could be fired from and ~2.5km a max, Really it's more like 2-2.3km is the maximum, and the minimum range for normal use is maybe 1.3-1.5km. But he usually looks between the maxes, or even fudges these to 2.1km and 2.6km, looking almost totally out of range. Maybe related: this winds up giving the best fit with that SAA strip. 

Spot 2) 298° NW: 30/11/13: New trajectory estimates from Al-Jazeera published - two seemingly good measures, but from no given location, and said to point to a second firing spot besides Mt. Qasioun - SSRC Barzeh, some 5km to the northwest. (this is the site later destroyed by US-led bombing in 2018). Higgins tried swapping these angle (290° , 307°) in to the two known location for a basic idea. Together with range it should give a basic idea, although we already "had an idea of the direction" from the UN report and this one was different. (if far better than "north")

Below: his image with many additions. He traced these angles in red to ~2.1 and then 2.6km, after setting them to diverge - not because they would, but because that widens the search area so a tiny bit of government territory might be indicated. This is a spot where tanks were based ("tank park" on some maps), but his 2.1km line is more like the OUTER range to find a spot than the inner edge he uses it as.

Even then, the area he indicates - centered 2.3km bearing 298 - is 3/4 opposition held (front lines not as clear then, but drawn in now).  Nearby areas more within range are 100% off-limits to the Syrian military.

http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/11/new-key-evidence-in-understanding.html

Update 14 Aug.: he did that wrong enough I'll need to update this: first, what he posted - note his area of interest, likely firing area, is between the dots well over 2km and 2,5km out - and area maybe 1/5 of this is part of the tank park, the rest rebel turf.

I finally checked his red lines and they are too parallel. 307 is good, but 290 is plotted like 299 or 300. Here for a third time with more notes - range to ~2.2km is more likely - in to 1.5 or less - full angle width = 99% rebel-held. Re-doing the right lines from the right spots, in lighter shades, and the right way (convergent on a spot, not expansive to include as many "choices" as possible)... and it comes out just a few meters north of where we think they came from. Likely explanation: wind drift, app. being to the northeast in the attack videos.

/end update.

He would suggest more data would point even better to right part of this island of regime control. But no. See here testing the same 2 angles (as he drew them, not verified) in blue from "our spot" - meaning the field explained in our 2021 reports, where the "Liwa al-Islam" Volcano launches seemingly occurred. It's not shown here but that roughly indicates two OTHER reported impacts. And it is OTHER ones they measured. One of them ("pool") was clearly located about at the end of one of these lines. The other can't be exactly placed, but probably does the same, coming out near an unseen but reported impact per HRW.

Spot 3) checkpoint near AF Intel: 17/03/14: Eliot Higgins tweeted "the area marked on this map was being attacked by the opposition before and after August 21st. ... It's the position of a check point, one of a number along that road." "It's not the "contested" territory some people would like to make out." AF Intel Harasta is here, just north off-frame, and all this interchange would be controlled, including the dug in position at the underpass. 

This spot features in a July 15 Bellingcat piece on government positions. An "electricity station checkpoint" was totally lacking visual evidence but was reported as active, just off the lower left corner here. This piece shows the green area of SAA control, and intersecting arcs 2-2.5km from known and mapped impacts, largely over that. 

But again, 2km is closer to a top end than a minimum. If we rounded down to 2km max from all mapped impacts, we would have a firing spot inside the black lines here. With the one corner disputed (see above, Wood), and the controlled highway that comes with it not included, that would leave ZERO SAA areas indicated. We don't round down like that, but the evidence points to a real firing spot just a bit further out than this, about 2.09km from the furthest impact, just 1.44km from the nearest one, and about 1.9km for most. (Mapping to Accountability, p. 53) Compare: furthest impact ~2.1km vs. Higgins usually starts looking only at 2.1km. Searches like that are almost guaranteed to be fruitless.

Spot 4) an arc near AF Intel, 2-2.5km out: 01/09/14: Chris Kabusk asked Higgins "For the north one, Volcano 5, we're interested in your works on trajectories on them." and "Just wondering if you did your works after you asked me to create those 3d models?" Eliot replied "the other rocket east of that points roughly nw too" and Based on that I think potential launch sites are in this area" - a smart-looking arc about 2-2.5km out, including the above-mentioned checkpoint and almost half of the happy strip of accessible spots to the south and west, just up to the bus station. Below with added labels. At the far end, this angles to include a little rebel turf - not so far from including our proposed firing spot, "Liwa al-Islam field".

Spot 5) Mid-2020: Somewhere W-NW-N 2-2.5k out: After a long span with no updates I'm aware of, Bellingcat offered their help sometime in 2020 to the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, who were helping the SCM and OSJI compile a fancy new lawsuit against Syria, in part over the Ghouta attack. In October this all went public, including their plotting the five impact sites Bellingcat had - including the wrong guess they never double-checked - and set their own huge arc shaded green (a different shade Bellingcat used, but green says go), covering almost 1/3 of the compass from nest to north, as if to cover all Higgins' readings AND/OR the UN angle or multiple lines. They acknowledge not having any clear location suggested, but "the area shaded in green represents this northwest area between 2.0 and 2.5 km from each impact site" - or an area that will be largely out of range. This, with nothing further in, gives "an approximate location from which the rockets may have been launched." As it happens, a bit past 2km seems to work, and the area we identified is within their "approximate location."

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/56c19f1dbcbb4054b524cacc5f6a9fa5

Spot 6) 2021: again 6-8km north?: Higgins' self-authored book We Are Bellingcat was released in early February. It includes a brief retelling of his/their Ghouta investigation, mainly the rockets and sarin recipe being linked 100% he felt to the government, to the complete exclusion of opposition actors - regardless what the forensics might say. And he never did settle that aspect very well, but here brags of locating a rocket using shadows tracing its single trajectory to "a Syrian military installation, largely surrounded by rebel-held territory." The footnotes for citation 96 take us to Brown Moses 26/8/13, or spot 1) above: his first take in 2013 for 6-8km from the north. 

A misread angle plus ignorance of range issues did underpin this one time he could identify a known army facility. Does he really now reject the 2-2.6-ish km range, when he had been so clear about that in 2014 and up to that Berkeley collaboration in 2020? Or was this like Higgins' OPCW-partnership "copy paste error"? Like the wrong citation to pick in haste, and then write a description of, never remembering how wrong it proved? Coincidentally allowing for the clearest 2D idea mapping to match what another 2021 book said: Joby Warrick's Red Line - 10km from Mt. Qasioun, seen and measured by OPCW inspectors - is now printed in this "non-fiction" book. Warrick's and Higgins' books came out almost at once (Warrick's later, 23 Feb.), allowing side-by-side readings - like Ahmad's at NewLines, writing ON Feb. 23 that Higgins "replicated the U.N. mission’s most significant finding" even with a trajectory differeny by ~75 deg. (see ny review). Gullible masses could thus be easily convinced we were back to clarity about those flashes seen on Mt. Qasioun, Higgins' careful visual work confirmed that, and all that Lloyd & Postol stuff was over. 

All proposed spots in review: where blue crosses green might have come up if best work on range and the "UN angle" was accurate. Higgins never did find reason to look there. Places he did marked roughly in red, and Bellingcat via UC Berkeley in green. The decent ones (mid-green and corresponding reds) come pretty close to the green star marking our perfect fit for trajectories narrowed down to an exact spot by site-matching to video of the rockets being launched. It doesn't get much better than that. While the early bad reading to the north was understandable then, his bizarre 2021 reversion to this is a real mystery.