Welcome to Memetic Warfare.
Readers of the blog may recall that I uncovered Eekad, a then-suspected Qatari influence operation. The original full length-research was published at the FDD, check the link above. This week, we’ll take a look at their activity since.
Back when I first published the report, the Eekad domain was inactive, though I posited that they’d be relaunching it soon.
As luck would have it, that was the case. Eekad has not only revived their website but given it what the youth would call a “glowup”.
They’re going for BRAT summer with a bold new lime green color and continuing their narrative lines - attacking Syrian minority groups,the UAE, Israel and others.
They’ve also added new sections to be more OSINT-y, such as a database section:
Eekad TV, which I’m sure will be a hit:
They also set up a dedicated Verification section:
They now also have a newsletter section to further connect with their audiences:
They also still cling to their identity as an “independent” media platform:
They’re also running Facebook ads for the new domain::
The ad plays up their content and its amplification online. As is to be expected, they didn’t include disclaimers and thus had their ad taken down (as in the past):
They’re not even trying to hide the payment in Qatari rials:
Notably, they’re now trying to target Syria with these ads:
Eekad has also wised up and moved their domain to CloudFlare.
I almost always show how I deanonymize a domain from anonymized hosting, but in this specific case I won’t just because they’re clearly on top of things. Luckily, you don’t need to know how because the proof is self-evident.
Eekad is really hosted on a Hostinger VPS - see the below address and subdomains on it. What’s that unusual domain also listed though?
Well, that subdomain clearly refers by name to Muna Omari, a “senior presenter” at al-Jazeera.
Eekad wasn’t very good at hiding its ties to al-Jazeera before, but now it’s as close to official as one could reasonably expect.
Concurrent hosting of a domain on a specific VPS means that the operator of that VPS chose to specifically host both of those domains. Perhaps Omari was trying to save some money and cohost, or perhaps whoever managed hers also manages Eekad. We don’t know, but this is one of the strongest degrees of connections available.
I’ll check in occasionally with Eekad, as it’s one of the most impactful, fascinating suspected influence operations ongoing.
Thanks for reading.