Hello there! Welcome to the third OSINT Challenge of my blog. As usual, below the instructions of the challenge, you will see a “spoiler alert” following which there will be a written walkthrough of how I got to the answer so that you may compare it with yours or so that it may help if you get stuck in the research.

INSTRUCTIONS:

According to a Wikipedia article, a U.S. air base not more than 70 km away from Derecik, Hakkâri, hosted a MQ-1C Gray Eagle for a period of time between 2018 and 2023. Can you verify this claim?

P.S. by verify I mean geolocate the air base in question and find evidence (not an article) that the MQ-1C was actually stationed there. Find also the month(s) and year(s) in which the MQ-1C can be spotted.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Let’s begin.

After analyzing the data available, the first thing that comes to mind is to find where Derecik, Hakkâri, is and to go on Google Earth Pro and draw a circle with the town at its center and a radius of 70 km. Here below, you can see the result.

If you don’t know how to draw a circle or any other shape on google earth pro (which as in this case it’s a vastly useful tool) here is a link to YouTube video explaining how to do them.

So, now based on the circle we drew we know that we want to search for US bases in Turkey and Iraq (in Iran for obvious reasons there no US bases). Let’s start from Turkey. After putting the following query on google “site:.gov (site:mil) US military bases in Turkey,” I found this very helpful map (see below).

As we can clearly see there are no US bases in the area we were looking for. Nonetheless, let’s confirm by also looking at non-official sources. Once again we discover that no American air base in Turkey is within 70km of Dericik. So, let’s look at Iraq. At the beginning, among official sources I could only find the Al-Asad air base (which after looking it up was clearly too far away from the circle). 

Therefore, I went on my beloved Wikipedia and looked for a list of American military bases in Iraq. There, I found the Al-Harir air base which is almost at the limit of the circle but definitely inside our range (here are the coordinates 36.5263147762766, 44.34595180708499). So, I went on to look whether I could find among US official sources about the existence/usage of this air base. And this what I found.

If you want to read the full article here it is, and if you want another confirmation like me here is another official document mentioning the US air base in Harir.

Okay, so after some more digging, this is indeed the only air base I could find among the determined range. And, if we look up Al-Harir air base on Wikipedia we can see that the article says that an MQ-1C Gray Eagle was hosted there between 2018 and 2023.

Therefore, it is time to verify the claim. The fastest way to verify such a claim is to look at satellite imagery to see whether it was spotted while it was at the air base by one of the satellites. So, I always do this step first and if nothing can be found then I look for pictures online and try to verify whether they were taken indeed at air base in question. Luckily for us, if we go back in time on Google Earth to February 2019 this is what we see:

That looks very promising. So, let’s verify it is indeed a MQ-1C Gray Eagle. First of all, I look online for specifications and for a picture showing how a MQ-1C looks from above. This is what I found:

The specifications were taken from here.

From the image alone, we can see that the resemblance is impressive. But, let’s go back on Google Earth and take the measurements just to be sure. This is the measurements I got: Wing span: 57.8 feet; Aircraft length: 27.9 feet. Given the fact that it is a satellite imagery and has therefore also an angle to it, we can say that the difference in the measurements is small enough to allow us to be sure that the aircraft is indeed a MQ-1C.

So now, we have verified and confirmed that a MQ-1C Gray Eagle was hosted at the U.S. air base in Harir in February 2019. But, let’s take it a step further and see whether it was hosted again. Unfortunately, on Google Earth Pro it was not spotted again, and the quality of the satellite image on Sentinel Hub in this case prevents us from confirming the presence of the MQ-1C at the air base. However, World Imagery Wayback (another great tool, here is the link) shows us that the MQ-1C was hosted again in January, 2020 as you can see below.

I hope you enjoyed this challenge. Thank you for stopping by 🙂