Resources on Human Rights and War Crimes
- I Am Syria This website offers a wide array of resources and data on the conflict. They have common-core friendly guides for educators seeking to teach students on ISIS, the Syrian Refugee Crisis, and the Syrian Civil War in General. They also run several campaigns working to spread awareness of the conflict and the refugee crisis. Additionally, they work to document war crimes, human rights violations, and the death toll of the conflict.
- The Syrian Accountability Project Organized by the Syracuse University College of Law, this project primarily creates documentation products in a narrative and graphical format, as well as a quarterly and annual trend analysis of ongoing crimes. They track and release detailed reports on war crimes in Syria.
- Violations Documentations Center in Syria This website (available in Arabic and in English) offers monthly, detailed reports on human rights violations in Syria. They also have a searchable database of victims of these violations with detailed information about those killed, missing, and detained.
Resources on the Syrian Refugee Crisis
- SyrianRefugees.eu This website offers a snapshot of the repercussions of this refugee crisis for the European Union. It is a project of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute in Florence. The website offers key data on the conflict, combined with a series of studies conducted by local researchers on behalf of the MPC. This project started in January 2013 as a result of a close collaboration between a team of journalists and these local researchers under the auspices of the MPC. Its main aim is to paint a broad picture of the worst refugee crisis to affect the region in years.
- UNHCR - Syrian Refugees and the Regional Response to the Crisis Contains useful data and statistics about the Syrian refugee crisis, including data about asylum applications and refugee camps
- The Uprooted, an Interactive StoryMap This interactive StoryMap presents data, graphs, maps, and photos on the refugee crisis.
Casualties
The present death toll in the conflict is heavily debated and it is difficult to accurately determine; it is hard for human rights groups to access all of the conflict area. Some estimates put the number of dead at around 250,000, others at 370,000 or 400,000, others place it higher at around 470,000. Separate estimates of battle only deaths put the toll at around 146,000.
Below is a graphical representation of the deaths documented by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights as of October 2016 (via Al Jazeera).
Refugees and Displacement
The UNHCR estimates that there are 4.8 million Syrian refugees who have fled Syria with another 8.7 million Syrians who have been displaced within Syria itself. Most of the refugees who fled Syria now reside in neighboring countries.
Below are infographics from the UNHCR, via Al Jazeera (Oct. 2016), the BBC (Feb. 2016), the UNHCR (Feb. 2017), and the UNOCHA (Mar. 2017) representing this.
