Briefing Note for the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs on Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic.
Topic
The aim of this briefing note is to guide and inform the Secretary of State on the ongoing Killings in the Syrian Republic as of August 2014. This Briefing note will detail the issues related to the Syrian Crisis and will show the Amount of Deaths and Killings suffered in the Syrian Arab Republic. This report shows only the Syrian Crisis Related Killings and not the ones caused by other factors. This HRDAG report shows findings on the documented War deaths in the Syrian Republic between the period of March 2011 and April 2014. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is described in this report as a non-profit, non-partisan organization that applies scientific methods to the analysis of human rights violations in different parts around the world.
Purpose
The purpose of this report is to update the previous data reports of the current documentation of violence in Syria. As the conflict is an ongoing one, it is important for the Secretary of State to be aware of the newer numbers of deaths that have occurred. The Secretary needs to be up to date in knowing the details of this brief and the challenges faced before we came to a good conclusion. This Briefing note details the regularities and irregularities that are compiled in the report. The previous report and this new updated analysis both include 3 data sources that provide useful information regarding the Syrian Crisis. The three Data providers from the previous report and the new one are:
1. The Syrian Centre for Statistics and Research
2. The Syrian Network for Human Rights
3. The Violations Documentation Centre.
These above sources provide updates on from the previous report. This report presents results based on five 5 sources (including the above ones). According to the report, the sources were chosen as the basis for these analyses for two reasons. The four Syrian human rights groups (the Syrian Center for Statistics and Research, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and the Violations Documentation Centre) have willingly participated in a data workshop organized by OHCHR. During this workshop was where OHCHR and HRDAG learned more about these data sources and their reliability. Also the records from the Syrian Government are included into this report as they should be more reliable and accountable. The Syrian government would be more informed and accessible to a wider information range than these other sources (the other sources are predominantly Human rights groups). The Syrian Government has been in the center of the conflict since it’s beginning, so this would give it an upper hand at knowledge against these other sources.
Background
This report presents an analysis of killings that have been documented in Syria between the period of March 2011 and April 2014, which is based on five data sources. Through comparisons and good individual reviews of these 5 sources, The HRDAG found a total of 191,369 unique records of documented killings out of an original number of 318,910. This Number details the killings of only non-Combatants/Civilian population. The report considers only documented killings that are identified by the name of the victim, as well as the date and the location of death. Reported killings that are missing any of these said information was excluded from this report and from our total numbers.
Ongoing Situation and Documentation
The issue in Syria is as a result of the Arab Spring and Power Struggle between different agents. The documentation of the deaths that are occurring during the Syrian crisis is quite poor. The report shows that these data sources are trying their best at collecting information, but it also shows how many wrongs that have occurred. The previous report was issued in the year 2013 and from that period then until this concluded new one, there have been more deaths related to the ongoing Syrian Crisis. The numbers presented in this report are based on the combination of the data information collected by the different human rights sources and Government of the Syrian Republic.
This report shows that the ongoing power struggle in Syria and war conditions make the accumulation of better records more difficult. This report also shows the way the HRDAG sorted out its findings. They demarcated/documented the killings findings into:
• The Sex of Victims: After accumulating and reviewing its sources well, the report totals the amount of killing to 191,369. Of the number documented killings in the report, 85% are male, 9% are female, and the rest 6% of records do not tell the sex of the dead victim.
• The Age of the Victims: The Age of most of the Dead victims isn’t documented and is therefore unknown. This amounts for about 84% of all the data’s. This irregularity proves problems, as it is impossible to make conclusions about the overall distribution of the age of victims.
• The Location of Deaths: The three Human rights sources all record more killings in Rural Damascus than in other Syrian governorates.
• The Combatant and Non-Combatant Status: As mentioned earlier, this report only focuses on the crisis related killings. This has to do with the status of the victims, whether as combatants or non-combatants is unknown for all but a few records. The status of the victims as combatants or non-combatants is unknown but for only a few records, but both of there statuses are documented in the report. Altogether the accumulated data sources include records of both combatants and non- combatants. The Aggressive combatants aren’t recorded into this report.
Irregularity and Documentation Process
This report begins with a number of 318,910 records of reported killings of identified victims from five data sources. It has been shown that many of these records are duplicates. This means that some of the Human rights sources would have recorded some of the same killings, which means names would be duplicated and seen more than once. This sort of irregularity was what amounted for human review to be used. The Human review was what was used to give a total of 191,369. Some irregularities found from these data sources include data records with the same names, dates, locations, or some combination of two or more of these attributes.
These 5 experts review these clashes and recalculate together as pairs for comparison for review. These review experts determine whether pairs or groups of records refer to the same death or not. This new single record is then again examined as a pair or group with other records, in an iterative process. The report shows that 3 of the review experts are native Arabic speakers (which is the official Language of Syria). They review records with the original Arabic writings. The report shows that the other 2 of the experts review data records translated into English. This makes it possible to check the capability of the expert reviewers, to ensure that they are each reaching comparable decisions regarding whether two sources refer to the same individual or they do not. Formally, this process is referred to as inter-rater reliability. The report shows how the experts arrange and the methodology used. They are as follows:
• Two records with the same name, date, and location may be identified as referring to the same individual, and be combined into a single record.
• In another review process, it may be found that data source also matches the name and location, but not the date, of a third data source.
• The last data source may list a date one week later than the two initial records, but still be determined to refer to the same individual.
Selection Bias is another thing discussed in this report. Selection Bias in this sense means each death has a different chance of being reported. This could be due to the individual features of the Dead or the Operating views of Data source. The final report analyses only show identified victims reported by each individual data source. Also this shows that data sources have varying powers of in regards of contacts and information gathering. One may have better contacts within a certain religious group, while the other may have better access to government records.
Data Collectors Information
These are the names of sources used for the report; they also give a little background on the amount of Information provided by each of these data groups. It will show what period they accumulated data that they each provide to the HRDAG. They include:
• The Syrian Government: This list was provided to HRDAG by OHCHR in September 2012. A request for an updated data from the Syrian Government in September 2013 and in April 2014 proved useless and no response was received at the time of the reports publication. Old records from the earlier report were used to accumulate.
• The Syrian Center for Statistics and Research: HRDAG used this website from here in May 2013 to obtain a copy of their newer published data. They were replied directly by them with a newer data.
• The Syrian Network for Human Rights: In February 2013, HRDAG established a direct relationship with them. They put up monthly reviews of their records and update their dataset with newly discovered victims. All data included in this report were provided directly from them.
• The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights: This list includes only civilians and opposition fighters who are not defectors as categorized by them. Previous data was used for the totaling as they refused to provide an updated version.
• The Violation Documentation Centre: Here the HRDAG only includes records from the list labeled as “Martyrs”.
Better Future Documentation is the way Forward
Finding a way to end this crisis is the ultimate future for Syria. Regarding this Report, Examining every reported killings and death is an important step in understanding Crisis in the Syrian Republic. It is a vital step in informing the world about the atrocities committed there. All these data sources prove to be unreliable without further analyses. I have come up with 3 ways in which we could collect and use data better from these sources. They include:
• Better documentation is the way forward. Despite the enormous efforts by the data collecting groups, many deaths in Syria are still going undocumented. One way to look at this is to consider that in some months some killings get documented by 5 groups, 3 groups and some by either 2 or 1 record some deaths.
• Also, These data collection groups need to all have a common Ruling Head Collectively. They should form an alliance and report these findings to one another through this alliance. Through this they would be able to crosscheck their Data’s better without future confusions or irregularity. This would be better helpful for reporters like the HRDAG.
• Reviewing of Names of the lists. There is shown to be an undercount of female victims in the records. Patience should be applied when making and taking data record. The report shows that many female names in the sources we incorrectly classed as male. This shows why the number of male deaths are significantly higher than that of females
These data sources should also be prudent in identifying War related deaths from those that aren’t. Without correctly identifying, both would be placed alike and could inflate the total accumulation.
HRDAG believes that many more killings remain undocumented, and that statistical models could be used to estimate the probable number of undocumented killings. The total 191, 369 is taken by this report as a minimum number of the killings and deaths between March 2011 and April 2014. The anonymous records describe victims of conflict in the Syrian Republic that deserves to be known also. However, they cannot be included into this analysis because it is would be impossible to determine if the records with partial information refer to deaths also described by other sources. Records with little information provide only a slight insight about the killings and deaths, which have not been fully recorded.