Recently, Human Rights Watch published an eighty-page report on Syrian government airstrikes, claiming to have visited fifty sites of airstrikes which killed 152 civilians. More so, the report claims that ” according to a network of local Syrian activists, air strikes have killed more than 4,300 civilians across Syria since July 2012.” Media reporting of the conflict has been implementing and engaging a narrative that the Syrian government is indiscriminately targeting the civilian population, sometimes claiming that this is a form of punishment. The audience is led to believe that the death toll as claimed by the UN, is largely made of of civilian casualties due to government brutality. A closer look at this report, as well as previous analysis of the context in numbers, reveal a more realistic summary of the situation.  If the observer delves deeper into the story, the narrative of the media is at extreme odds with the portrayal of a regime that is brutally targeted it’s own population.
Before reading the report, it is critical to understand and implement key protocol for dealing with reports, as in this case, “provocatively titled Death from the Skies”, which serves to compound the dramatic reporting of the conflict.
  1. The figures (i.e. death toll) are used as political tools. Western commentators, both political and in the media, fail to make the critical distinction between combatant and non-combatant. Therefore, we cannot come by an accurate picture of the conflict. This critical question, of what percentage of the toll accounts for combatants, would lead to an undermining of the consistent narrative of a regime hell bent on slaughtering its own population.
  2. The data is questionable to begin with. The source quoted by almost all media outlets is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) which is administered by a Syrian expat living in Coventry, England. The operation is vehemently anti-government and makes no secret of it. The Guardian’s article on the death toll is a worth a read.
  3. Significantly, little or nothing is said about civilian casualties as a result of actions of the armed groups in Syria. Hundreds of videos exists of mortars, heavy artillery and crude, homemade rockets being fired indiscriminately toward heavily built up and sometimes clearly populated areas. We’re not been given the full picture.
  4. Even if we take the statistics and claims in the HRW as correct, then the “4,300 civilians have been killed in the regime’s aerial bombardments from July 2012- March 2013″, it appears (using the death toll report from that time period) that this toll accounts for 9% of the entire death toll of 50,000.
Of course, the airstrikes are a reality. There can be absolutely no denying that civilians are killed as a result. The conflict has mostly uprooted the normalcy of everyday life in Syria and has severely disrupted the lives of civilians who have had no choice but to escape to refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The conflict is harrowing and heartbreaking.
The media is sometimes keen to portray an image of a situation where civilians are forced to leave “due to the violence of Assad”, despite the total absence of any study to ascertain the reasons of refugees having fled over the borders.
Importantly, little is said about armed group’s own admissions, about infiltrating population centers, be it towns or villages, forcing the government forces to respond leading to inevitable insurmountable suffering of the residents – injury, displacement or death. Indeed, armed groups who haven’t succeeding in infiltrating Damascus en masse have resorted to firing crude weapons mentioned above – rockets, mortars and sometimes improvised air-to-ground rocket pods mounted on vehicles.
We encourage our readers to read Musa al-Gharbi’s latest piece dealing with the HRW report.