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1. Not Dead Yet: Our own @NicheIntel and @Intel_Prof use #FacialRecognition app @Betaface and voice comparisons to examine the rumours Abu Rofiq of #MalhamaTactical faked his own death in February of 2017. We discuss some of the interesting findings here. #OSINTpic.twitter.com/irnntl2Tfn
2. On Feb 7th 2017 Malhama Tactical announced that its leader Abu Rofiq had been killed in a Russian airstrike on his apartment in #Idlib, Syria. A report by @ForeignPolicy entitled The Blackwater of Jihad, countered that Abu Rofiq was not present at the time; per a local source.pic.twitter.com/IqFbSkpGIy
3. After almost a year absent on social media, Malhama introduced Abu Salman Belarus as its "new" leader. Since then, there have been rumours that Rofiq faked his death. The biggest deterrent to testing the rumours were the lengths Abu Salman went to in masking his identity.pic.twitter.com/6w5X8m9QQt
4. However, in Nov of 2018 the On the Ground News (OGN) network reported on the killing of Russian troops by #TahrirAlSham and #Malhama Tactical fighters. In that video Abu Salman exposed a large portion of his eyes, nose and brow. Enough for features to be analyzed and measured.pic.twitter.com/KMfub9XBoR
5. Examining previous pictures and video footage frame-by-frame we extracted known images of Abu Rofiq and Abu Salman. When we then compared the images using the online @Betaface app the resulting facial recognition analysis provided matches ranging from 79.2 - 84.8%pic.twitter.com/O8f693skjf
6. Going beyond what the facial recognition AI could do we also looked for other identifiers that might factor in a comparison. We observed that Abu Rofiq had a mole/sun spot under his right eye. Using the same OGN video we observed the same mole below Abu Salman's right eye.pic.twitter.com/VWCnVUXcUF
7. Finally, we conducted a voice comparison between Abu Rofiq and Abu Salman. In the analysis we were looking for similar cadence, tone, range, and word pronunciation. As can be heard in the analysis below both voices appear very similar.pic.twitter.com/YGUQisxcQN
8. All of this leading us to conclude there is a high degree of confidence that Abu Salman is Abu Rofiq and that Malhama Tactical likely faked his death in 2017 to avoid further targeting. Read more about our work as reported by @Ilkersezerrr herehttps://twitter.com/Ilkersezerrr/status/1092688182058123264 …
I knew it!
Excellent work!
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