Who’s Killing Civilians In Syria?
Who’s Killing Civilians In Syria? MPC Journal
© Photo: The Syrian Campaign
I joined the early days of the Syria uprising in February 2011.

It was only a matter of weeks before the chants and dancing were met with bullets and arrests from the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.

I saw my brother and sister get killed. Many Syrians suffered similar tragedies. I was fortunate that at least I knew what happened to them. People were disappearing or dying all around me and no-one was keeping records. In your country these deaths are likely registered by the government, in Syria it was the government killing the people.

I set up the Syrian Network for Human Rights to document what was happening to civilians in Syria.

I wanted to make sure that there was a record of all crimes so that the world could know what was happening. So that every family could find out what happened to their loved ones.

Have a look at the data and find out who is killing civilians in Syria

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We have a network of thousands of volunteers inside Syria reporting on who is attacking civilians and how. My team then sorts these thousands of reports, verifies them and complies reports for Syrians and the world. It’s a tough work.

But we don’t want people to die silently. For us this record is very important.

When we started we were documenting just a few types of violations: Sniper fire, torture, execution. Five years later we have dozens: Scud missiles, barrel bombs, chemical weapons, cluster munitions.

Weapons we could not imagine in our worst nightmares are now part of our everyday lives.

I travel around the world showing this information to people. Every time I show it I get faces of surprise. They expect me to tell them that ISIS (Daesh) is the main killer, but the reality is very different. What’s happening in Syria is a government massacring its own people. The biggest killer of civilians is aerial attacks – ISIS doesn’t own a single plane.

Please take a look at the charts here: With my friends at The Syria Campaign we have put together a website that shows who is killing civilians since the start of the fighting

By Hakim Charles

Hakim Charles studied political science of the Middle East, European Studies, journalism and linguistics. He has been lecturing at different German universities since 2011 on issues related to ideology and the interplay of power thereof in socio-political life, and religion and its relationship to contemporary politics in the regions of West Asia and North Africa, especially Egypt and Syria. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Mashreq Politics & Culture Journal (MPC Journal) since 2014 and has published over 100 articles in different languages, academic and otherwise, in a wide spectrum of on-line and printed newspapers, journals and think tanks. His current research focuses on Islam-inspired political ideologies such as Islamist extremism and Salafism, radicalisation, de-radicalisation processes in Germany as well as peace and conflict in the Middle East.

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