[Originally published as "Pattern of Life: Where Would Hosni Mubarak Flee?" on the Recorded Future Blog]

When dictators are overthrown they are typically either killed in short order (think Nicolae Ceauşescu) or they flee. Without too much statistical analysis, we can come up with deposed leaders that left their country for France (Baby Doc of Haiti) and Saudi Arabia (recently, Ben Ali from Tunisia).

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is in trouble. Given the ongoing protests against his government, we may be interested in finding out where, if forced, he would flee. We won’t attempt to make a judgement call on whether he will survive or explicitly find his travel plans since they presumably don’t exist directly in the open source.

In considering where Mubarak might go, we’ll use his patterns of communication and travel over the last 12 months as identified in Recorded Future to provide guidance.

Communciation Patterns

Hosni Mubarak Communication Trends

• Hosni Mubarak had interactions with a large number of world leaders including Obama, Clinton, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Berlusconi.
• Mubarak also privately met with the head of Oman – Sultan Qaboos bin Said – during his visit to Egypt.

Travel Patterns

Inspecting the treemap of President Mubarak’s travel patterns over the last year, we find some interesting clues to where he might go if forced to leave Egypt:

Hosni Mubarak Travel Patterns

• One of the highest momentum cities in the visualization is London. This comes with an interesting indicator on the Huffington Post: “It was reported two days ago that Gamal Mubarak, son of President Mubarak was heading to London with a big entourage and about 80 pieces of luggage along with his mother, Suzanne Mubarak, and high officials, though Egyptian sources dismiss the report as false.”
• Germany stands out in the above treemap, and we learn that Mubarak traveled there for cancer treatment in 2010. Would Germany have him back given that they provided him medical attention? Similarly, Mubarak also travelled to Paris for suspected health reasons.
• Italy has been called out as the strongest European connection for Egypt, and Mubarak seems to have a strong relationship with Berlusconi. Mubarak also stopped in Greece when returning from his last trip to Italy.
• Other web sources (not at all verified) suggest a strong relationship between Mubarak and the rulers of the UAE might make it a prime destination.
• Mubarak has travelled to a number of Arab nations like Libya, Jordan, Sudan, Algeria, but those places would be potentially unstable and not necessarily offer protection in the long run.
• Ben Ali, the former leader of Tunisia, recently fled to Saudi Arabia where Mubarak was for discussions in late 2009. The Egyptian president met with King Abdullah in mid-2010 in a peace summit, and the Saudi king very recently expressed his support for Mubarak. Supposedly this chant can be heard in Egypt right now: “Christian or Muslim it’s not important, similar poverty similar concerns! Hosni Mubarak, Hosni Mubarak, the plane is waiting, the plane is waiting. Saudi Arabia is not far!”
  
• Mubarak has also been in the US for peace summits and other political meetings, but the US seems an unlikely place to flee.

Conclusion

Hosni Mubarak has a much broader set of connections and travel patterns than Ben Ali of Tunisia, and potentially has more places to go should he be forced from Egypt. Still, the options seem limited if he wants to establish a long term place to stay.

Even if Mubarak has kept plenty of interactions with the US, France, UK, Germany, and others, it would seem unlikely that any of those countries would take him in although Italy may be an exception.

Saudi Arabia stands out as the strongest candidate given both its recent display of support as well as historical connections. The UAE and Oman might be other relatively safe places.

In the end, our bet is on Saudia Arabia.

Previously we used Recorded Future’s temporal analytics to examine the short term evolution of information on a newly revealed security threat in our series on Faisal Shahzad, also know as the Times Square Bomber (or would-be bomber).

In this post we’ll show how we were able to utilize Recorded Future’s data extraction and visualizations for open source intelligence to quickly develop a pattern of life analysis for an American-born terrorist. Recorded Future paints a broad landscape spanning nearly 40 years depicting the transformation of Omar Hammami from an Alabama-born honor student to an Islamic Extremist indicted on terrorism charges.

Searching the full time range of Recorded Future’s index for the entity Omar Hammami, we find recognizable expressions of time back to Hammami’s parents first moving to Mobile, Alabama from Syria in 1972. This initial, extended timeline allows us to see upon cursory glance the dramatic increase in relevant data as we move toward the current date.

Timeline of Omar Hammami Patterns Of Life

Following this early event the next notable marker represents Hammami’s birth in 1984. Recorded Future harvested online content that  highlights early influences of religion in Hammami’s life through his father (Islam) as well as with his mother (Christianity). We also begin to see mention of his prayer in school and a vocalized aversion to violence in his earlier years:

Between 2000 and 2002, we see an uptick in momentum on Hammami as he reportedly defended the cause of Osama bin Laden during a classroom discussion his junior year of high school (2000). Soon after, Hammami enrolled in the University of Alabama where he became the president of the University of Alabama’s Muslim Student Association. He would drop out of the university in 2002 before graduating in order to devote himself to Islam, which may account for the gap in references that year.

Omar Hammami Pattern of Life

Moving forward, reports identify Hammami marrying a Somali woman in 2005 while he worked in Toronto before traveling to Africa – first Egypt, then Somalia. We can see his marriage and links to Toronto and Egypt by querying the event “Person Relation” and the entity “Omar Hammami”.

Hammami Marriage in Toronto

It is after his final move to Somalia that we identify his first connection to the terrorist organization al Shabaab in 2006. Hammami’s earliest affiliation with the group is discovered by querying the event “Person Career” and the entity “Omar Hammami”.

Recognizing the use of an alias in our research, we search for the entity “Abu Mansour al-Amriki” and find Hammami anonymously made his first public statement as part of al-Shabaab under this nom de guerre.

Hammami assumes nom de guerre as Abu Mansour al-Amriki

In addition to the temporal data, we can take a look at the diverse connections in Hammami’s network of personal relationships, travel and affiliations using the network visualization. When we analyze connections of Hammami we see a pair of dense loci including:

Hammami's link to Somalia is in the top right

al-Shabaab Link Analysis

As we continue to analyze his patterns of life we see peaks in momentum representing high profile events including Hammami’s identification in a March 2009 news report on Somali jihadists and his subsequent indictment on terrorism related charges in September 2009. Finally, online momentum hits a high in January 2010 driven by an introspective New York Times Magazine piece on Hammami’s transformation.

Clearly, the rabbit hole is deep and convoluted in Omar Hammami’s story. Using Recorded Future, we can drill deep into the events in Hammami’s life surrounding September 11, 2001, which appears to be a crucial moment in his shift to radicalism. Also of interest is the period where he traveled from Toronto to Egypt to Somalia and there ultimately landed with the al-Shabaab group.

Recorded Future provides intelligence analysts a tool, which is continually enriched through real time updates of live data sources, to quickly identify and visualize events from unstructured data, network linkages and identify emerging trends in the past, present and future.

Jump start pattern of life analysis with Recorded Future!