Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi (; born 1992) is a British-Iraqi researcher and analyst who specialises in the Syrian Civil War, War in Iraq (2013–2017) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (commonly known as ISIL or ISIS). He has been consulted as an expert by major media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and others. In March 2020 he was a doctoral candidate at Swansea University and he successfully defended his PhD thesis in January 2024.

Early career In an otherwise scathing 2014 Business Insider article, Armin Rosen described then 21-year-old Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi as one of "the fastest rising stars in his field — his online connections and self-presentation to jihadists he was attempting to mine for information." Rosen wrote that Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi who was then a "recent graduate of Oxford University" had already "become a widely-cited public authority on jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria while still completing his undergraduate studies" at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. The Insider article said that by 2014, Al-Tamimi had been "generally considered a leading public authority on jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria."

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press have published Al-Tamimi's "insights on the Islamic State, Iraq, and Syria", according to a March 2020 report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP or TWI).

Major stories His report entitled "The Islamic State's Real Estate Department: Documents and Analysis" was published by The New York Times and George Washington University as part of the University's Program on Extremism. The Times and the University had joined in an "exclusive partnership" to "digitize, translate, analyze, and publish" over 15,000 files, now known as "The ISIS Files"—which had been obtained by the investigative journalist Rukmini Callimachi and her "Iraqi colleagues during embeds with the Iraqi army". The Time and the university had announced their intention to make the ISIS files public in 2018 and published them online in June 2020. Al-Tamimi published a friend's firsthand account of Ramadan's predatory behavior on his website—an account which was sourced in the VOA article.

An in-depth 30 December 2015 report in the Washington Post, which included an interview with Al-Tamimi, presented extensive evidence that documents that were leaked and purported to prove that the Islamic State was weakening were fake. In the article, Al-Tamimi, whose research on the Islamic State is considerable, said that suggestions that he write a book were premature. "Just as the best histories of Nazi Germany have been written well after the Second World War with archives of documents made available to researchers, so I apply the same reasoning to analyzing the Islamic State. As researchers we need to be aware of the limits of our capabilities in obtaining information."

His reports on the Khalid ibn al-Walid Army in Syria in 2016 and 2017 were published by the Rubin Center.

A March 2020 report entitled "Honored, Not Contained: The Future of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces", which he co-authored with Michael Knights and Hamdi Malik, was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP or TWI).

Unethical methods to track jihadists (2013–2014) Armin Rosen, who was then Business Insider's senior writer for defense and the military, wrote a scathing article that the "young terrorism analyst's" career had come "apart in public".

Background On 14 July 2014, Jonathan Krohn and Al-Tamimi co-authored an article which had attempted to disprove evidence presented by the American journalist Michael Weiss in his 23 June 2014 Foreign Policy article, which claimed that Iran was aiding ISIS.

This differing of opinions of the three analyst's provided the backdrop for Rosen's 14 July 2014 Insider article. He claimed to know the British Islamic State fighter Raphael Hostey ('Abu Qaqa') personally. Among other posts Al-Tamimi made on Twitter were ones claiming "one day even the Kaaba in Mecca will be covered with the ISIS banner" and "Dawla Islamiya (Islamic State) will take over the whole world". While Al-Tamimi was banned from any further contribution to the site, Bellingcat continued to cite Al-Tamimi as an expert in later articles. In his 2016 Bellingcat report, investigative journalist, Christiaan Triebert cited Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a "fellow at the Middle East Forum," to clarify any confusion about the management of water infrastructure in Raqqa. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, pointed out that there was no evidence that the Nusra fighters managed Raqqa's water affairs. He said that "civilian services were largely the responsibility of the local council while Nusra focused on their war efforts".

Al-Tamimi responded to Rosen's accusations saying that, "I think there’s something to be said that I did try to ingratiate myself in these circles to get information, I agree that that was unethical.”