The Middle Eastern nation Syria has been in a state of civil war since last seven years with different groups trying to seize control of the country. The country has become an international battleground where various states and their proxy networks have been continuously clashing with each other. The war has taken the lives of more than 465,000 people so far and displaced more than 12 million, of which 6 million refugees have been dispersed around the world.

About Datasets

A media documentation — the Syrian Archive Dataset is an open source platform that collects, curates, verifies, and preserves visual documentation of human rights violations in Syria. It maintains an extensive video database of all known allegations in which civilians have been reported killed or injured since 2014. Till April 20, 2018, this database includes 4,384 videos which were documented by journalists, citizen reporters and activists.

A recorded death list — the Violations Documentation Center in Syria is one of the largest human rights organisations established in 2011 with staff members and contacts in all governorates and most cities inside Syria.

The complex nature of the war in Syria limits access to open database. And therefore, the data extracted could miss some important information; however, we will be analyzing the situation in Syria with precision by filling some of the gaps with the help of other dataset.

On the morning of April 14, 2018, the US, Britain and France bombarded three government sites in Syria allegedly targeting the chemical weapons facilities. Is it true that Syria has been continuously suffering from its internal turbulence which needs to be intervened by foreign players?

We drew a general picture of the Syria attacks based on the dataset of 329 which were recorded from January 1, 2017 to April 20, 2018.

Part 1 General Picture

Living Hell

In the war-torn country, Aleppo, Damascus, Idlib, Hama and Daraa are the cities documented by both the databases as the locations where most of the violations took place, despite some slight differences on the rankings of these locations.

In the war-torn country, Aleppo, Damascus, Idlib, Hama and Daraa are the cities documented by both the databases as the locations where most of the violations took place, despite some slight differences on the rankings of these locations.

The media coverage of the locations where most violent incidents happened are highly identical to the locations recorded in the actual death list.

To be specific, the Syrian Archive, which demonstrates media coverage, witnessed most violations in Aleppo (1,920), followed by Idlib (219), Hama (103), Damascus (97) and Homs (39).

The Violations Documentation Centre of Syria, which records the actual registered death list, also presented Aleppo (7,990) as the most violation prone city in Syria, Damascus (6,372) stood tall at second, Idlib (4,434) and Deir Ezzor (2,904), a city which was absent in the media coverage database.

In terms of geographic distribution of the violent incidents in Syria, Aleppo and Idlib are the two cities ranking among the tops in both the documentations and have been the most disputed regions taken up by either rebels or jihadists, thus these are the locations where the Syrian regime and its allies have been concentrating their firepower.

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