Thread by @Brian_Castner

In August we went to Tripoli to do post-blast investigations on civilian casualties. Full @amnesty report & cool interactive map at the link.

But for #osint & #weapons twitter here's a long #thread on what exactly we pulled out of the craters & bomb dumps amnesty.org/en/latest/news…

We made it to 33 strikes, on both sides of the front line: Tarhouna, Qasr Bin Ghashir, Wadi al-Rabie, al-Swani, etc. Some of the craters were a month old. Others, like a slaughterhouse hit on Eid, were just struck that day. I managed to pull fresh frag out of nearly every spot

Not surprisingly, old inaccurate Gaddafi-era rockets and artillery caused the majority of civilian casualties. But we saw A LOT of Blue Arrow 7 strikes - in the vacated buffer along the front lines, lots of cheap burned out technicals hit by v. expensive guided missiles.

You can ID the BA7s from the distinctive wing brackets, that seem to often survive detonation.

Occasionally you also get lucky and get the obvious white gas bottle and servos too.

On 27 July, a BA7 hit a field hospital near the intl airport, killing 5 docs and medics, and wounding many more. The crater is actually on the porch, under an overhang, as you can see from the frag pattern, meaning the missile had to fly in from the front, parallel to the ground.

In Tripoli, we also found many LNA air strikes using old unguided French SAMP 250kg bombs. As usual, front nose wells and base plates survived. (HT @fredgrs for the assistance confirming these).

In contrast, the GNA seem to be dropping mostly old FAB-250 style bombs and newer FAB-500ShL parachute bombs. The 250s have distinctive old crappy welded fins, while the 500s are better machined. (HT to @Oded121351 confirming this puzzle)

The main target for LNA artillery and rocket fire is Mitiga airport, and so civilians living nearby are being hit by woefully inaccurate misses (which is why these indiscriminate weapons shouldn't be used in cities). Unsurprisingly, tons of 9M22U Grad frag everywhere.

But the artillery that we found was all old (i.e. 1940s designed) 100mm, probably OF-412s. It's distinctive due to the double rotating band, and we found some UXOs in the civil defense storage area to compare.

Here's some other stuff we found, not tied to specific attacks.

9M133 Kornets are being employed, but we only found a few UXOs. Same with cluster munitions - a few old RBK-250 tails laying around, but no confirmed recent use.

Other interesting finds: Russian 9K31 Strela-1 surface to air missile, Yugo M79 Osa HEAT rocket, Italian 75mm M32 artillery (from the 1930s), French 68mm SNEBs.

And then, of course, all the SALW for @CalibreObscura:

One last note: something we were able to do on this investigation was unite the work of @samdubberley's Digital Verification Corps and field work in a new way.

The DVC often works retrospectively, to verify cases we find in the field. theengineroom.org/digital-verifi…

On this mission, we flipped that on it's head, to do the OSINT up front to find attacks, like this one:

https://twitter.com/ObservatoryLY/status/1128282518673940486

And then geolocate it so we can go verify in the field investigation. Local officials initially told us there was no attack in this place. But we had the coords, and could go to the exact spot and find our own fresh physical evidence.

More like this to come.
/END THREAD

One more: interactive map with all the strikes and findings here. This is a new web tool we're trying, would love your feedback on its functionality/effectiveness/etc.

public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…