In cooperation with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, a group of Syrian activists launched a new project to investigate and document the war crimes being committed by the Assad regime against Syrian civilians in parallel with the mass forced displacement the Assad regime is carrying out against residents of northern rural Homs and southern rural Hama.
The German capital Berlin saw the announcement of the establishment of the Syrian Archive, a project that is aimed to establish a database documenting the violations and war crimes being committed by the Assad regime against Syrian civilians.
The projects seeks to collect, maintain, investigate and catalogue evidence of violations taking place in Syria, especially chemical attacks.
It all started in 2014 when eight Syrian activists began establishing the Syrian Archive with the assistance of four international universities and a number of research organizations and centers, including Amnesty International, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and Bellingcat platform. The project is the first of its kind for digital documentation.
The Syrian Archive has already saved more than a million videos, with around 4,000 of these verified as genuine, said Syrian human rights activist Hadi Al Kathib. He noted 90 percent of these violations have been committed by the Assad regime.
The collective’s most recent research, based on analysis of 2000 videos, Twitter messages and Facebook posts, indicates that a total of 212 chemical weapons attacks were carried out in Syria between 2012 and 2018.
Kathib pointed out that the number of chemical attacks that were catalogued in the Syrian Archive is higher than those recorded by international organizations and institutions.
The Syrian Archive contains videos of 61 chemical attacks carried out by the Assad regime since 2012, including 14 attacks in Rural Damascus countryside, 14 in Idlib, 33 in Aleppo, 29 in Hama, six in Homs, three in Dara’a, and one on Deir Ezzor province.
Khatib added that the videos that were fact-checked showed that chemical attacks represented a systematic process and a strategy of war that the Assad regime is using as they took place in 85 different regions in Syria. He explained that the videos were verified using sophisticated techniques and through a thorough analysis of the source of the videos as well as the locations were they were filmed. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
