Executive Summary

In early November 2019, a video depicting several Russian-speaking men beating, decapitating, and burning a Syrian man in an unknown location began circulating widely on Russian social media platforms. Within days of the video being posted by open source investigators on Twitter, reporters with Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s only remaining independent daily news outlets, published a report that revealed that the victim’s name was Muhammad Taha al-Abdullah. It also revealed that at least one of the Russian-speaking men in the video had fought in the embattled region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine before traveling to Syria to work as a contract soldier for the Russian private military security company known as the Wagner Group.

Additional investigative reporting by a Paris-based Syrian investigative news outlet called al-Jessr Press, indicated that the video first surfaced on social media sites in 2017, but at that time little was publicly known about the identities of the men behind Abdullah’s killing or about the victim himself. Numerous reports have since linked Abdullah’s death to the Wagner Group’s operations at the al-Shaer gas facility in Syria’s Homs governorate, and to the private paramilitary group’s titular management company, EvroPolis, and paymaster Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch who has been the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Data acquired from open sources as part of this preliminary case evaluation appears to corroborate Russian and Syrian media reports identifying perpetrators depicted in the film as members of a Wagner Group contingent. Preliminary findings from the investigation confirmed that Abdullah (محمد طه إسماعيل العبدالله), who is also known to family and friends as Hamdi Bouta, was most likely killed not far from a Wagner Group encampment near the al-Shaer gas plant northwest of the city of Palmyra, Syria in the early summer of 2017. Additional data culled from EvroPolis company records corroborates connections between Wagner Group operators and the involvement of EvroPolis, and other Prigozhin-linked firms, as well as Russian state-backed enterprises involved hydrocarbon exploitation in the al-Shaer fields. EvroPolis accounting records indicate that the al-Shaer gas plant and three other energy production sites generated roughly $162 million in revenues for Prigozhin’s firm in 2017 alone.

Analysis of digital evidence and data mined as part of this case evaluation revealed that the perpetrators of Abdullah’s gruesome killing at al-Shaer likely belonged to one of four of the reconnaissance units deployed by EvroPolis across the Homs area to retake and protect strategically important energy production sites in the region. Facebook pages for EvroPolis employees who traveled regularly in the Middle East and local Syrian state energy firm employees appear to corroborate a high degree of capacity for close coordination on issues such as security for the site where the killing occurred. While further investigation is needed to verify the perpetrators’ identities and the circumstances surrounding Abdullah’s death, the trail of digital clues points strongly to the Wagner Group’s involvement in the incident and indicates financial and logistical support from EvroPolis as well as financial and logistical support from Syrian and Russian state-backed firms active in the area at the time, including state owned Gazprom and Stroytransgaz, a Russian state-backed firm sanctioned by the United States for its alleged involvement in supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.¹

Social network analysis of online data also indicates that at least four Wagner Group operators on the scene at the time during the battle to retake al-Shaer in the spring and summer of 2017 at one point had links to Rusich, a Russian fighting contingent implicated in war crimes in the contested region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine. Exploration of social media data collected from Vkontakte, YouTube, and other sources also turned up potential evidence of a link between the men behind Hamdi Bouta’s killing and Wagner Group fighters who were killed in a U.S. strike on a column of forces loyal to the Syrian regime in Deir Ezzor on February 7, 2018. A considerable amount of work remains to fill in narrative gaps and verify the specific facts of the case, but analysis of available open source data strongly points to the potential culpability of individuals and entities that receive substantial backing from the Russian Federation in war crimes and mercenary activity. All these insights suggest that a combination of social network and supply chain analysis will be critical to understanding the trajectory of Russia’s private military security industry for the foreseeable future.