This past July, the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, Marine Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, gave a wide-ranging speech on current intelligence trends and the future of his agency. Perhaps one of the most striking comments from his speech was his assertion that the first notice the US intelligence community had of the launch of a Scud missile from Yemen into Saudi Arabia in June was from a series of tweets. Despite a multi-billion-dollar fleet of satellites designed to identify any missile launch worldwide, Lt. Gen. Stewart alleged that “The first warning of that event: ‘hashtag scudlaunch' ... Someone tweeted that a Scud had been launched, and that’s how we started to search for this activity.”
How is social media reshaping our ability to witness global conflict in unprecedented ways and what does a Scud missile launch really look like through the eyes of Twitter? On June 6th, 2015, Houthi rebels in Sa’dah, Yemen, fired a Scud missile towards Khamis Mushayt in Saudi Arabia. The missile made it almost to its destination, but at 2:45AM local time two Patriot missiles fired by the Saudi Arabian military intercepted the Scud in flight and destroyed it before it reached the ground.
BBC Monitoring, which analyses local media in over 100 languages from 150 countries, examined reporting on Twitter around the time of the interception and identified several tweets from user “@MiZo729” that appear to chronicle the launch of the missile in realtime (all times reported as Arabia Time Zone). At 2:45AM, the exact time of the interception, he tweets “Urgent: strong explosion heard in outskirts of Abha!” (Khamis Mushait is just east of Abha).
This is followed four minutes later by “Initial reports indicate an explosion at the air base #Abha.”
Six minutes later he clarifies his statement to indicate that it was the air base that was struck and that Abha Airport was not damaged.
At 2:57 he corrects his original statement with “Breaking news … Yemeni Scud missile exploded before it reached the air base. #Abha.”
At 3:00AM he tweets “News of a second missile destroyed and no assurances yet! #Abha.”
At 3:04 he summarizes the situation to date with “Scud missile out of Yemen was intercepted by ‘Patriot’ anti-missile batteries before it exploded and caused no damage thankfully.”
Finally, at 3:17AM, 32 minutes after the missile was launched, he notes “Sirens extinguished at the air base after running for approximately 10 minutes… To be sure we can be proud of our courageous homeland.”
About 15 minutes later another user “@7kayaa6” posted a short 8 second video of air raid sirens sounding with the caption “Warning sirens in the city military ballistic missile fired towards Khamis Mushait and thankfully was intercepted by a Patriot missile and destroyed.”
By at least 4:05AM a YouTube video was circulating that purported to show the Patriot launch and interception of the Scud missile (though this cannot be independently verified).
Other users reported explosions (3:00AM) and sirens (3:04AM) in Khamis Mushait and by 3:06AM were also reporting that a Scud missile had been intercepted and destroyed by a Patriot missile. By 3:08AM there were reports that the families of soldiers at the air base had been evacuated and by 3:37AM calm appeared to be returning with no reports of injury or death.
Finally, by 5:45AM the Saudi Press Agency had officially announced the missile launch and intercept on its official Twitter account. It was not until 8:13AM, nearly five and a half hours later, that the Associated Press appears to have run its first “Breaking” news alert about the launch. AlJazeera English ran its own story shortly afterwards at 8:36AM. Finally, by 1:22PM, the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office released a travel advisory for its citizens regarding the launch.
There is not enough information to determine the definitive location of the users above, but given the reports and video of air raid sirens, it is likely that the accounts above were all users tweeting from Saudi Arabia, rather than Yemen. Indeed, the map below shows how little Twitter penetration there is in Yemen. All geotagged tweets in the Twitter Streaming API (1% of all tweets) from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2014 are displayed on the map below, with the approximate borders of Yemen outlined in a red rectangle, while Abha (the target of the missile) is circled in red. Abha and the surrounding area is seen to have extremely high Twitter penetration, which continues to the border and ends abruptly at the Yemeni border, meaning that the Yemeni side of the conflict is likely to be poorly represented on Twitter.
Geotagged tweets in Twitter Streaming API January 2012 to December 2014 - red rectangle is Yemen,... [+]
Here we have seen what a Scud missile launch looks like on Twitter and that in this particular case the Saudi counter-response appears to have been literally live-tweeted in exquisite minute-by-minute detail, from initial mistaken reports and rumors to final confirmation and even video of the interception and the resulting air raid sirens. Such incredible detail demonstrates the enormous power of social media to offer a realtime glimpse into conflict in the areas where it is used. If the videos above are accurate, then within an hour of the launch a user on Twitter would have been seeing firsthand events happening on the other side of the world through the eyes of those experiencing them.
On the other hand, as the map above makes clear, due to the rarity of geotagged tweets from Yemen, our glimpse into the conflict through Twitter will likely come nearly exclusively from residents of Saudi Arabia. Those glimpses will also be in Arabic, making language expertise essential to understanding conflict in the social media era. As the social media revolution continues to expand, it is likely that conflict will increasingly offer firsthand real-time glimpses like this.
What does this mean for the future of understanding conflict in the social media era? If Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart’s remarks are to be believed, a handful of tweets posted by ordinary citizens on the ground provided the only warning of a missile launch that billions of dollars of purpose-built military satellites missed. Even if his remarks stretch reality, the sequence of tweets above show the incredibly rich realtime view into remote events that is available today via social media in that areas it is available.
At the same time, it also shows the limitations of that view – offering only one side of the Yemeni-Saudi Arabia conflict, and the importance of language expertise in accessing those views. At once this example shows the incredible potential of the “global town square” model of Twitter, and also what may be lost as the future of social media becomes more closed and privately shared. After all, it is only because these users wanted to share with the world what they were seeing and experiencing that we are able to see firsthand what a Scud attack is really like, something most here in the US have likely never experienced.
I would like to thank BBC Monitoring for their assistance and highly unique expertise in researching the chronology of Twitter coverage of the Scud launch.
