Beginnings in DC, and on a mapping project
About the author: Nitish Vaidyanathan ’21 is an FSI Global Policy Intern at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington, D.C.
Hi! It’s been a few weeks since I started working at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and living in DC. A few scattered thoughts on both of those:
TIMEP is a fantastic place to work and I have learned a bunch. In the first three weeks, I have primarily focused my research efforts on the PMFs, the popular mobilization forces in Iraq. These were a loose coalition of militias that arose after the rise of ISIS in 2014 for the ostensible purpose of combating them. However, many militias have ties to Iran and appear to be acting on Iranian foreign policy interests. Our project seeks to analyze the different groups in the PMFs and hopefully uncover some stuff about the how and why they operate. I started off by doing a bunch of geolocation to try and map their positions relative to the fight against ISIS. The first cut that we’re planning on making is by comparing the distance between brigades that we believe are more oriented as proxies and those that are more oriented as militias from the front with ISIS. We used a web-scraping tool to look at the Facebook pages of a bunch of different factions within the PMFs, and then we catalogued locations that they reported themselves at. We supplemented this with a thorough literature review of preexisting writing on the PMFs.
Additionally, I have participated in TIMEP’s daily research briefing, which is where we try and keep our advocacy and senior staff up to date on the events in the region. This usually involves crawling through Tweetdeck and finding on the ground reporting to give us the most up to date information. I am tasked with collecting news on Iraq, Iran, and Syria. This has been a really interesting experience, as a lot of the time we are briefing staff on events that haven’t made it to the news yet, or on events that don’t really have any clear identification. For example, one of the things I had to report on were Israeli missile strikes in Syria, but a lot of the difficulty was in deciding whether or not such a strike had even occurred. It’s pretty challenging being this early in the news cycle on these events, but it ended up being a really rewarding experience as I was able to help our advocacy team and senior staff respond as quickly as possible to changing conditions on the ground. This is also a great way for me to learn about countries that I don’t know a whole lot about; by sitting in on the briefings, I was able to learn about the political and economic situations in a lot of different countries in the MENA region. We also got the cool opportunity to attend other events in DC, and the author Massoud Haynoun came to the TIMEP offices to talk about his new book.
Lastly, on DC: it’s a great city to live in. It’s super walkable, and the metro allows you to get anywhere with ease. My favorite part so far are the museums, particularly Freer-Sackler. Both the SIW dorm and TIMEP are on the redline, so transportation is super easy. Definitely one of my favorite cities. See you soon!
