Syria Feature: How "Independent Analysts" Are Breaking the Stories of the Conflict

Britain's Channel 4 profiles EA Worldview's James Miller and other independent analysts on Syria

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On Saturday, news emerged of a new kind of weapon --- a 12-tube rocket launcher with a range of 8.5 to 13 kilometres (5.5 to 8 miles) --- that has made it to the front lines of the Syrian conflict.

The news, significant in itself, is the latest development in the wider, important story of how Syrian insurgents are using foreign-supplied Croatian arms to make crucial gains against President Assad's troops.

These advances since January could even prove to be the tipping point in the two-year insurgency.

There may be another tipping point: by developing methods to gather information and analyze open-source intelligence, an emerging group of "independent analysts" are breaking news stories far ahead of any mainstream outlet.

And in doing so, they are changing the international conversation about Syria.

In recent weeks, mainstream media have reported on Croatian weapons in the hands of insurgents. However, they might never have noticed this dramatic development had it not been for those new analysts and reporters who not only discovered but tracked the foreign-supplied arms, poring over hours of videos and first-hand accounts in Arabic and English.

It was Eliot Higgins, also known as "Brown Moses", who first noticed that weapons from the Former Yugoslavia had started to appear in the hands of opposition fighters.

EA Worldview's research and analysis tied these weapons to a string of insurgent advances and a new re-organisation of opposition forces in the south.

Independent journalist Michael Weiss, based in the US, first suggested that these weapons may had arrived from Croatia.

These analysts and reporters have been instrumental in breaking key stories throughout the two-year Syrian conflict. From the growth of the protests and violence in 2011, to the capture of a group of Iranian "pilgrims" in August 2012, to insurgent attack and military stalemate in Aleppo -- and now the discovery of Croatian weapons in Daraa Province -- they have developed new methods to monitor and assess complex, chaotic events as they unfold and develop on the ground.

They do not replace the field correspondents, who continue to take great risks to bring out news. They provide a valuable service to these correspondents, by piecing together vital fragments from vast quantities of real-time data, talking to citizen journalist, activists, and witnesses, and transforming this raw intelligence into timely, informed analysis.