| | | Date: Nov 23, 2018 | | Source: The Daily Star |  |  |  |
| | Public to help track casualties in Raqqa | Gemma Fox| The Daily Star
BEIRUT: Anyone with access to the internet will soon be able to help investigate potential war crimes caused by the U.S.-led coalition’s bombing of Raqqa during its campaign to retake the city from Daesh (ISIS) last year.
Amnesty International, in partnership with Airwars, wants to mobilize online volunteers from around the world to help its ongoing investigation into the true scale of the destruction of the city and the number of civilian casualties caused by coalition airstrikes.
Using “Strike Tracker,” members of the public will analyze satellite images taken of buildings damaged or destroyed over the course of the battle to try and map out a timeline of events. The U.N. estimates that 10,000 buildings or 80 percent of the city were destroyed.
With some 160,000 images, the sheer volume of evidence, Amnesty says, is simply too great for it to go through alone and so it is trying to scale up its abilities.
Amnesty will then corroborate the data with its ongoing analysis of social media and witness testimonies of civilian casualties, to try to determine what happened and when, and how many people were killed as a result.
“We’re doing the job that the coalition should be doing,” Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s senior crisis response adviser, told The Daily Star.
“They’re the ones that bombed, so it is their responsibility to do a decent investigation to establish what the results of the bombardments were for the civilian population.”
Rovera, who has been in Raqqa gathering witness testimonies for the investigation, says that everywhere she went she heard stories of people who had lost multiple family members as a result of the strikes and who were angry at the “reckless” way in which the coalition tried to retake the city.
“The civilians were clearly not the priority in the minds of those who designed and carried out the military operation,” she said.
In mapping out the whole campaign, Amnesty hopes to pressure the coalition to admit the extent of its responsibility for the impact its operation had on civilians.
Coalition spokesperson Col. Sean Ryan told The Daily Star that the fight against Daesh was “a very difficult process” because militants had entrenched themselves among civilians and used many as human shields, but stressed that the coalition went to “great lengths to avoid hurting civilians.”
“The coalition used video, human intelligence and surveillance of areas, however, in some instances, did not know innocent people were being held below in buildings while ISIS [Daesh] used the rooftops to conduct their deadly siege,” he said.
“For Amnesty to accuse our actions as ‘blatant denials and shoulder-shrugging’ according to Milena Marin, is just not accurate, and a poor portrayal to attempt to dehumanize the coalition.”
In an earlier phase of Amnesty’s investigation inside Raqqa, the group provided new evidence that it said compelled the coalition to acknowledge the death of over 70 civilians. In total, the coalition has acknowledged 104 civilian deaths during last year’s campaign, but Amnesty believes that the toll is much higher.
“With bodies still being recovered from the wreckage and mass graves more than a year later, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Milena Marin, senior adviser on Amnesty International’s Crisis Response team. Some 2,500 bodies have been pulled from the rubble and uncovered in mass graves, with searches continuing.
Raqqa was once the capital of the Daesh’s self-styled caliphate, which at its height encompassed a third of Syria and Iraq. Having lost the vast majority of its territory, the group’s control has been reduced to small pockets in Syria. |
| | |
|
