Syrian rights organizations see tallying a final death toll while establishing a full and transparent victims’ archive as part of a larger effort to move beyond violence and forge a “new Syria.” “This [full accounting] is essential because we need redress, we need acknowledgement and to let their families know what happened to them,” Fadel Abdulghany, founder of The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), told New Lines.

The positive news is that a lot of documentation has already been done. Sometimes dubbed the “first YouTube war,” the conflict was one of the most recorded in history, with the establishment of organizations such as Syrian Archive to preserve images and videos cataloging violations of human rights. Both within Syria and among the millions of refugees who fled the country, a strong civil society developed. In addition to SNHR, several other high-quality, independent documentation organizations emerged, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) and the Violations Documenting Center (VDC). Each has independently tracked the conflict and produced casualty counts.

Each organization uses different methodologies involving networks of activists, independent reporters and sources on the ground to inform their casualty counting processes. When possible, this local knowledge is combined with records from hospitals, cemeteries, family members and eyewitnesses to corroborate information. Despite the immense danger activists risked on the ground to collect data, their work was vital for documenting patterns of harm in Syria, giving insight into the scale of civilian loss, which is otherwise obscured to an international audience.

Documentation is also complicated by the number of parties involved. In addition to Assad’s regime, the myriad rebel groups and the Islamic State, a wide range of foreign nations conducted strikes throughout the 14-year civil war — each killing civilians. The U.S., UK and France were among the nations involved in the coalition against the Islamic State, leveling cities in the north like Raqqa. Other parts of Syria were hit by Russian forces, partners to the Assad regime in its military campaign against rebel-held territories. In recent years Turkish actions have intensified across the northeast, and Israel has hit Iranian-linked groups throughout Syria. A 2022 investigation by Airwars — the open-source, casualty-recording nonprofit — into a single strike on a hospital in Afrin pinpointed three potentially responsible parties.

This complex web of attribution is reflected in the casualty recording process, with each documenting organization having more focus and detailed information on certain regions, actors and time periods. Each organization can only capture a slice of the full reality, resulting in wide-ranging casualty estimates.

SOHR, which uses evidence from a variety of sources across local and international networks, has recorded the names of more than 500,000 people killed across Syria, with more than 30% (164,223) reported as civilians. SNHR — which has a detailed verification process, working with local activists and field documentation experts to identify cases, gather testimony, check records and monitor and cross-check open-source content — has documented 231,495 civilian deaths. VDC’s most recent estimate is 147,009 civilians killed, with a model that similarly relies upon a wide network of local data collection teams, including reporters, human rights activists and others. Airwars recorded at least 24,000 civilians reportedly killed by Russian, Turkish, Israeli and U.S.-led coalition airstrikes alone.

With differing approaches to casualty recording, and varying thresholds of verification required to log a casualty, a civilian may enter into one database, but not another. Combining the datasets helps illustrate a larger picture of civilian harm in Syria.

There have been previous attempts to do this — mostly led by the United Nations. In 2021, the U.N. Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released its most recent cumulative tally of those killed — with SOHR, VDC and SNHR making up three of eight sources used to estimate death tolls.

Led by the nonprofit Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), the process began with creating a merged dataset of "fully identified victims" to avoid double counting. Only casualties whose complete details were listed — such as their full name, date of death and which governorate they had been killed in — were included on this initial list, Megan Price, executive director at HRDAG, explained. If details were missing, the victim could not be confidently cross-checked across the eight organizations' lists, and so were excluded. This provided HRDAG and the U.N. with a minimum count of individuals whose deaths were fully documented by at least one of the different organizations.

HRDAG then developed a model to estimate the number of both "partially identified victims" — for whom only some biographical information was available — and those whose deaths occurred but were not documented by any organization. In a war as long as Syria’s, tens of thousands of victims were never recorded for a number of reasons. Many were killed by heavy weapons, for example, making identification impossible. Others were among the millions of internally displaced, which meant local sources often did not recognize them.

To try to estimate the size of this undercount, HRDAG measured the degree of overlap between fatality lists, examining the pattern of inclusion of individuals in the eight lists supplied by the documentation groups. At its core, this process builds on the “capture-recapture” model invented to estimate the size of human and wildlife populations. In the case of the latter, a number of animals are captured and tagged. When animals are captured again, the rate of those that have been tagged previously allows you to make an estimate about the overall size of the population.

When it comes to civilian harm, the degree to which differing lists overlap makes it possible to estimate the overall size of the population. By analyzing the patterns behind individuals appearing on some lists and not others, researchers can estimate how many individuals might not be included on any list — determining the scale of the undercount.

The final result was a projection based on a series of probability estimates, and so presents the overall civilian death toll as a range to account for a margin of error. In 2022, the U.N. put the estimate based on HRDAG’s analysis at between 281,443 and 337,971 deaths.

While this methodology attempts to get closer to the overall death toll, it, too, is likely still an undercount — described as “statistically sound” by the OHCHR, but not an absolute total. Importantly, the thousands of forced disappearances and missing detainees were not included in the U.N.'s estimates, as the process required confirmation that the victims had been killed.

This was the last release of civilian casualty estimates in Syria from the U.N., with the evidence behind the report — such as the full list of names — remaining undisclosed to the public. With the complexities of the war intensifying and access restrictions leading to waning accuracy, the U.N. stopped publishing numbers.

International organizations have a mixed reputation in Syria, with many Syrians feeling frustrated by failures to end the war earlier. Others went further and accused the U.N. of collusion with the Assad regime. This was epitomized by the recent scene of a Syrian woman approaching the car of U.N. attache Geir Pedersen and shouting: "You're just coming now?"

There is already a push for Syrians, rather than international bodies, to lead the process of drawing up a full casualty list. "I would prefer a Syrian-led organization or commission, but with support from the U.N. and other institutions like the ICRC," Abdulghany said, referring to the International Committee of the Red Cross. "We need all the effort — especially financial support — but it should be Syrian-led."

“To deliver meaningful justice, there needs to be coordinated action across the entire accountability ecosystem, and most importantly, Syrian organizations must remain central to the process," Rawan Shaif, an investigator and analyst specializing in human rights violations, told New Lines. "This requires robust support to strengthen their capacity through funding, training and other localization efforts, to make sure they have the tools and resources to lead the way effectively.”

Researchers have largely been unable to work openly inside Syria in the past 14 years for fear of arrest, so the fall of the regime also opens up possibilities for new forms of research. Among these are province-by-province surveys, whereby a statistically relevant number of people are interviewed per region and wider conclusions drawn.

However, these methods can lead to more debate. In 2006, research published in The Lancet used such methodology to estimate that more than 650,000 Iraqis had been killed directly or indirectly by the war in Iraq. Nearly 20 years on, the methodology still causes dispute. And these studies, while creating aggregate numbers, would not culminate in a detailed list of victims.

Abdulghany argues aggregate totals are not enough. A system of attribution where individual perpetrators and foreign forces are identified is needed to lay the groundwork for prosecutions. Crucially, a full list of confirmed civilian deaths made publicly accessible, detailing the names of those killed, is vital for families searching for victims.

A further challenge will be how to account for the tens of thousands disappeared into Assad jails. In the wake of Assad's overthrow, opposition groups swarmed detention prisons, military sites and secure compounds, releasing thousands imprisoned by the authoritarian regime. However, many are still missing, with loved ones of victims campaigning for answers. Documents detailing the atrocities of the Assad regime are also being uncovered, with processes forming to preserve the records as evidence in courts of law.

Over the course of the conflict, the SNHR database recorded 136,000 people detained or forcibly disappeared under the regime, Abdulghany said. Since Assad's collapse, SNHR has confirmed the release of more than 20,000 individuals, but more than 110,000 people remain unaccounted for. “Drawing upon thousands of death certificates in our possession, along with our extensive monitoring of reopened prisons and communication with families, I can state with confidence that the majority of these individuals have tragically perished under torture,” Abdulghany said.

The monumental task of tallying the dead across 14 years faces many challenges with the establishment of a transitional government, and it is unclear if the new government led by Islamist Ahmed al-Sharaa is committed to it. Already, casualty recording organizations are calling for urgent measures to preserve all evidence emerging in the chaotic weeks since Assad's collapse, including securing all mass grave sites. Failure to do so, they warn, may result in tens of thousands of victims becoming permanently unidentifiable.

While urgent action is needed, any process will likely be slow. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission took almost three years to produce its final report, with updates made five years later. The Kosovo Memory Book, which was established to provide a full death toll for the 1998-2000 war, is still adding entries nearly 25 years after the conflict ended. But these efforts, like the one in Syria, can cut through the supposed fog of conflict to help piece together the stories of those killed and bring answers to families whose questions have gone unanswered.