When it comes to Syria's rebels, the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that there are countless factions with a range of agendas and it's difficult, if not impossible, to know exactly who they are.
But ask researchers who've spent two years digging into social media and YouTube videos and they offer a remarkably detailed picture of rebel brigades, their ideologies and their arsenal of weapons in the fight against President Bashar Assad's regime.
"It's a myth that we don't know about the rebels," says David Kilcullen, the CEO of Caerus, a Virginia-based strategy firm that tracks Syria's governance councils for clients that include the U.S. government, aid agencies and development banks.
Kilcullen, a former counterterrorism strategist at the U.S. State Department, says the Syrian conflict is the most open in history. One rebel group, the Free Syrian Army, supports seven YouTube channels, updated daily. Islamist battalions wage "hearts and minds" campaigns on Facebook. Syria activists and fighters maintain hundreds of Twitter feeds.
"There is a new level of connectivity," Kilcullen says. "We have an enormous data base. It's easy to know what's going on. It's hard to validate."
For Kilcullen, one of the key takeaways is that the more moderate rebel groups are becoming less influential in comparison to the more radical Islamist factions.
"The civilian, secular democracy folks have been sidelined," says Kilcullen. "That is just a fact of life and I do think it's tragic. Today, you are looking at a polarized resistance, a larger number at the extremes."
A Profile Of The Rebels Emerges
Researchers at Caerus spend hours calling into Syria to confirm videos for detailed analyses that include monthly reports on the price of bread in the bakeries of northern Syria, where much of the fighting takes place.
Nathaniel Rosenblatt, a Caerus researcher, is working on a study of rebel checkpoints around Aleppo, Syria's largest city in the north of the country.
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