Nine-year project involved tracking of thousands of strikes, and the deaths of up to 25,000 civilians
Airwars has published the final of nearly 5,000 incidents of civilian harm from Russian military strikes in Syria, bringing to an end the largest documentation campaign in the organisation’s history.
In total the archive includes 4,941 separate incidents of harm dating from 2015 when Russia first intervened directly in Syria to aid President Bashar al-Assad until the dictator’s eventual toppling in December 2024. This includes more than 60,000 open sources that Airwars’ teams have reviewed, processed and archived, linking each claim to a place in time where a civilian was reported to have been killed or injured.
In those incidents, Airwars found that as many as 25,256 civilians were reported to have been killed. Each incident is documented and publicly available via the searchable Airwars archive.
Russia first intervened directly in Syria in September 2015, five years into the country’s civil conflict, to support the Syrian regime. In the first three years, more than 45,000 airstrikes were declared by Russian forces. While the initial alliance between Russian and the Syrian regime declared they were targeting the Islamic State, the two actors often focused on rebel-held areas.
Russian and Syrian regime pilots often flew the same Russian airframes, used the same munitions and tactics, and also flew joint patrols. For this reason, local communities found it extremely challenging to attribute civilian harm directly to one party or another – as a result many of the incidents in the Airwars archive are tagged with both Russia and the Syrian regime involvement.
Much of the civilian harm in the early years of the Russian campaign was concentrated in Aleppo, where airstrikes destroyed large parts of the ancient city, and later concentrated in the region of Idlib.
Shihab Halep, Airwars’s Senior Conflict Researcher and himself a refugee from Aleppo, documented this campaign since it started. Halep describes the intervention as “brutal from the first day, leading to new suffering and introducing a powerful way of killing civilians.” With the regime now fallen, Halep says the campaign “leaves harsh memories that are unforgettable. I now wish that this huge archive will not be ignored, and will find its way to a process of accountability.”
The final months of the Russian campaign, during the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saw a major uptick in strikes and civilian harm – in a desperate and ultimately failed attempt to protect Assad.
Among these last incidents is an alleged Russian airstrike in November 2024 in which at least 18 civilians were reported killed. A further 186 civilians, including at least 19 children, were also identified as being injured. Airwars’ teams trawled through pages of notes from hospitals and testimonies from relatives online to piece together the details of civilian harm, finding the names of those harmed in the attack.
Airwars documented civilian harm from all foreign actions during the country’s long conflict, including the US-led Coalition in Iraq and Syria, and Turkish actions in northern Syria.
Airwars previously released a report highlighting patterns of harm from Russian actions 2015-22 and a major report highlighting the findings of a decade of work will be released later in 2025.
Emily Tripp, Airwars’s Executive Director, said the documentation would continue to have resonance.
“This research shows the painstaking work of our documentation teams, in a conflict that has shaped so much of our work and approach to documenting civilian casualties. We have shown through this persistent effort that it is possible to make sense of who is being harmed and how, even in such an intense environment,” she said.
“While this phase of our work has reached a significant milestone, this is only the beginning of a long road: our task now is to ensure that this monumental effort serves Syrians in their call for justice, and that we are able to leverage this evidence base for accountability.”