Supported by
How Syria’s Death Toll Is Lost in the Fog of War
transcript
Wait? Run? Views From Below a Syria Airstrike
Military forces often boast about the awe of airstrikes and missile launches, but what’s it like to experience their deadly shock on the ground?
We often see airstrikes and missile launches this way: miles away from their targets, or overhead but through a distant lens, or maybe just from a safe proximity. We see the “awe” but rarely feel the “shock.” Because the Syrian conflict has been so thoroughly documented in video, we now have another perspective: what it’s like to experience that shock. A single person on the ground, targeted by something that can move faster, see better and hit harder. Moving just a short distance can save your life. There’s often silence. No warning. Sometimes there’s little else to do but wait. Other times the only thing to do is run — even when what you’re running from can travel faster than the speed of sound. This was said to show an American airstrike on Syrian regime forces last year. The technology directing these weapons means you can be close to impact and yet unharmed. Islamic State said this was a U.S. airstrike. Yes, many times weapons come from far away. But sometimes the warning is clear. This was a Russian cruise missile over Syria several years ago: a rare glimpse of a high tech aerial attack in transit. Of course, these are all brief moments of impact. The aftermaths go on.
In seven years, the casualties of Syria’s civil war have grown from the first handful of protesters shot by government forces to hundreds of thousands of dead.
But as the war has dragged on, growing more diffuse and complex, many international monitoring groups have essentially stopped counting.
Even the United Nations, which released regular reports on the death toll during the first years of the war, gave its last estimate in 2016 — when it relied on 2014 data, in part — and said that it was virtually impossible to verify how many had died.
At that time, a United Nations official said 400,000 people had been killed.
But so many of the biggest moments of the war have happened since then. In the past two years, the government of President Bashar al-Assad, with Russia’s help, laid siege to residential areas of Aleppo, once the country’s second-largest city, and several other areas controlled by opposition groups, leveling entire neighborhoods. Last weekend, dozens of people died in a suspected chemical attack on a Damascus suburb, prompting the United States, Britain and France to launch retaliatory strikes against Syrian targets early Saturday.
In addition, American-led forces have bombed the Islamic State in large patches of eastern Syria, in strikes believed to have left thousands dead. And dozens of armed groups, including fighters backed by Iran, have continued to clash, creating a humanitarian catastrophe that the world is struggling to measure.
Historically, these numbers matter, experts say, because they can have a direct impact on policy, accountability and a global sense of urgency. The legacy of the Holocaust has become inextricably linked with the figure of six million Jews killed in Europe. The staggering death toll of the Rwandan genocide — one million Tutsis killed in 100 days — is seared into the framework of that nation’s reconciliation process.
Advertisement