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Original research
Overview of attacks against civilian infrastructure during the Syrian civil war, 2012–2018
  1. Evan Muzzall1,
  2. Brian Perlman2,
  3. Leonard S Rubenstein3,
  4. Rohini J Haar4
  1. 1Stanford University Libraries, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
  2. 2Human Rights Center, School of Law, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA
  3. 3Center for Humanitarian Health, Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
  4. 4Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Rohini J Haar; rohinihaar{at}berkeley.edu

Abstract

Background Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed during the Syrian civil war and millions more displaced along with an unconscionable amount of destroyed civilian infrastructure.

Methods We aggregate attack data from Airwars, Physicians for Human Rights and the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition/Insecurity Insight to provide a summary of attacks against civilian infrastructure during the years 2012–2018. Specifically, we explore relationships between date of attack, governorate, perpetrator and weapon for 2689 attacks against five civilian infrastructure classes: healthcare, private, public, school and unknown. Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) via squared cosine distance, k-means clustering of the MCA row coordinates, binomial lasso classification and Cramer’s V coefficients are used to produce and investigate these correlations.

Results Frequencies and proportions of attacks against the civilian infrastructure classes by year, governorate, perpetrator and weapon are presented. MCA results identify variation along the first two dimensions for the variables year, governorate, perpetrator and healthcare infrastructure in four topics of interest: (1) Syrian government attacks against healthcare infrastructure, (2) US-led Coalition offensives in Raqqa in 2017, (3) Russian violence in Aleppo in 2016 and (4) airstrikes on non-healthcare infrastructure. These topics of interest are supported by results of the k-means clustering, binomial lasso classification and Cramer’s V coefficients.

Discussion Findings suggest that violence against healthcare infrastructure correlates strongly with specific perpetrators. We hope that the results of this study provide researchers with valuable data and insights that can be used in future analyses to better understand the Syrian conflict.

  • health policies and all other topics
  • health systems

Data availability statement

Data are available in a public, open access repository. Data are available upon reasonable request. Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available. The dataset used in our analyses is available at: https://github.com/EastBayEv/syria_overview_bmjgh2021. Given the political sensitivity of the research, information on individual incidents compiled by the research team using open source technology are available upon request to researchers. Data aggregated from third party sources must be requested directly from the source institutions via their websites. Data presented in this study must not be used for commercial gain, nor sold or passed on to any third party without the express written consent of Airwars, Physicians for Human Rights and Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition and Insecurity Insight.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006384

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    Data availability statement

    Data are available in a public, open access repository. Data are available upon reasonable request. Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available. The dataset used in our analyses is available at: https://github.com/EastBayEv/syria_overview_bmjgh2021. Given the political sensitivity of the research, information on individual incidents compiled by the research team using open source technology are available upon request to researchers. Data aggregated from third party sources must be requested directly from the source institutions via their websites. Data presented in this study must not be used for commercial gain, nor sold or passed on to any third party without the express written consent of Airwars, Physicians for Human Rights and Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition and Insecurity Insight.

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    Footnotes

    • Handling editor Seye Abimbola

    • Twitter @rohinihaar

    • Contributors LSR and RJH conceived of the project. BP led the data collation and extraction. EM conducted the analysis. EM and BP wrote the draft. RJH and LSR reviewed the draft. All authors reviewed and approve of the final manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. Publication made possible in part by support from teh Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.