Al-Shorfa

» see al-shorfa.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Turkey borders this story without being in it. Al-Shorfa published for the Gulf states in Arabic, with an English edition and a Farsi one, and it was aimed at readers whose governments sat on the other side of a border I have lived next to my whole life. I did not read it at the time and neither did anyone I knew. It is in this list because it was a real website with real reporters that ran for seven years, and because of who was paying.

The site went up around 2008 under the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, a program run by US Special Operations Command that built regional news sites in local languages from North Africa to Central Asia. Al-Shorfa was the Gulf one, assigned to Central Command. The front page carried a lead story over a features rail, with a daily poll and a weather box down the side. It looked like a provincial newspaper working with a generous budget.

Where it differed from most information operations is that it never pretended. The disclosure was not buried in a legal page nobody clicks. It was the first sentence of the About page, and it named the command.

~ the case file ~

~ what the about page said ~

The text ran, word for word: Al-Shorfa.com is a web site sponsored by USCENTCOM to highlight movement toward greater regional stability both through bilateral and multilateral cooperative arrangements. A few lines later it confirmed that the analysis and the interviews came from paid Al-Shorfa.com correspondents, which they were. One 2015 story about Iraqi Christian families receiving food aid in a Beirut suburb carries a photo credit to Nohad Topalian, a working journalist in Lebanon.

The copyright notice is the part that lingers. Unless something was marked otherwise, everything on the site was in the public domain and could be copied and redistributed by anyone, because a US government work generally is. That applied to the entire output of an influence operation, which is why copies of it still sit in other people's archives today.

~ the rename ~

Congress killed the funding in Section 344 of the fiscal 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, having concluded that it could not tell whether any of this was working. Magharebia, the North African site, went dark in February 2015. Al-Shorfa's last substantial front page was crawled on 16 March 2015.

Then the second act. Al-Shorfa became Al-Mashareq. Mawtani, the Iraq site, became Diyaruna. By 5 October 2016 a request to al-shorfa.com was answering with a redirect to almashareq.com, which is as clean a piece of evidence as this kind of research ever produces. The program had been ordered closed and the response was new branding on the same servers. The Intercept reported in April 2026 that the initiative had spawned ten sites and that at least one of the successors is still operating under Central Command today.

~ what is there now ~

al-shorfa.com resolves to a four-line parking stub that bounces the visitor to a lander. The brand was dropped completely, with no notice and no archive link.

The successor domains got a better ending, of a sort. Both almashareq.com and diyaruna.com now serve the same 447-byte page, identical down to the stylesheet, reading This website is no longer available and then We appreciate your past visits. Two news operations funded to win an argument in the Gulf, closed with one shared farewell note that somebody wrote once and deployed twice.

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