Abstract
ABSTRACT The authors of this article – a team of graduate students led by a professor – identified the probable hideout locations of the fugitive ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. To do this, we built on a geographic profiling approach created by another academic team. In addition, we created a profile of the buildings Baghadi could hide in and analyzed one of his speeches to glean further details of his whereabouts. Soon after our analysis was complete in the fall of 2019, Baghdadi was killed by U.S. forces in north-western Syria. Subsequent reports suggest our assessment was valid during the spring of 2019: one of Baghdadi’s confirmed locations is an hour drive from an area we suspected he would hide. And, on at least two occasions, he hid on the outskirts of town as we expected. However, once Baghdadi fled to Syria our analysis was invalidated because we misunderstood the fugitive terrorist’s motivations and hiding strategies. To improve our approach, we recommend the integration of additional analytic techniques to stimulate critical thinking. This article contributes to the academic literature on fugitives in national security and provides an example of a ‘real world’ open source analysis task with relevance to academics and practitioners.
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