Dataset of Russian Attacks Against Syria's Civilians

The Syrian Archive maintains an extensive video database of all known allegations in which civilians have been reported killed or injured by Russia since September 30th 2015.
This is one of the datasets that the Syrian Archive has collected, and we will continue working on collecting and creating other video datasets of violations by all parties to the conflict against civilians.

This Russian attacks database includes 1561 videos which has been captured by Syrian journalists, citizen reporters and activists as evidence to expose and draw attention to alleged human rights violations committed by the Russian forces in Syria.

Our goal in collecting, verifying, and publishing the videos is to bring attention to the effect of Russian attacks on Syrian civilians and show the scale and pattern from the point of view of citizen reporters who witnessed those incidents. In addition, we are cross-referencing videos of Russian attacks from different sources with the casualties that have been documented by various documentation centers such as the Violation Documentation Center which published the details of 2068 civilians as can be seen here.

Here you can find the video dataset of alleged civilian casualties from Russian attacks, which includes footage of:

• Destruction of hospitals and schools as a result of alleged Russian attacks;
• Destruction of civilian objects such as buildings, markets, mosques, bakeries, factories, displaced camps as a result of alleged Russian attacks;
• Videos of Russian planes flying over specific areas captured by citizen reporters;
• Destruction of water infrastructure by Russian attacks which is confirmed and cross referenced with a video published by the Russian MOD;
• Remnants of prohibited weapons and munitions used by Russian forces in Syria e.g cluster bombs;
• Civilian casualties including children and women as a result of alleged Russian attacks;
• Witness testimonies of civilian casualties or targeting civilian objects by alleged Russian attacks.

Here you can see an interactive timeline to filter the attacks which happened between September 29th 2015 | March 31st  2016.
We can see from the timeline that 506 videos have been captured in October 2015 by citizen reporters as evidence of alleged Russian attacks against civilians.

We can also see below that there were videos captured in March 2016 by citizen reporters as evidence of alleged Russian attacks against civilians which means that Russia has possibly violated the ceasefire truce agreement in Syria that started in 27th February 2016. The Syrian Network for Human Rights has a full report about this here.

Reports on Russian attacks on Syria’s civilians

We have collected a list of reports which have been published by human rights organisations and investigative journalists about the Russian attacks on Syria’s civilians in Sept 29th 2015 | April 30th 2016. Organisations include Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Syrian Network for Human Rights, Violations Documentation Center, Bellingcat, Airwars, Carter Center and Atlantic Council. You can find all reports in the end of this page.

Third: Verifying the location

Every video went through basic geolocation to verify that it has been captured in Syria. We have identified the actual province in most videos and the actual coordinates in some of them. This has been done by comparing reference points such as buildings, mountains range, trees, minaret with Google Earth satellite imagery, openstreetmap and geolocated photographs from panoramio. In addition to this we have checked the Arabic accent spoken in the video to make sure of the location of the video. Where possible we have contacted the source directly to confirm the location and also consulted our network of journalists operating inside Syria to confirm the locations of specific incidents. As a result of geolocating the videos, we have noticed that most of the videos were captured in Talbisah which is located in Homs and Latamneh which is located in Hamah.