On January 3, 2026, the U.S. military conducted an operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, termed Operation Absolute Resolve. In response, Airwars researched and assessed all claims of civilian casualties and all claims of civilian infrastructure damage or destruction from the wave of airstrikes that day.
This methodology note contains details on our approach for documenting civilian infrastructure incidents, which expands Airwars’ typical focus on casualty events only. Our methodology for documenting civilian casualties can be found on our main methodology page.
We adopted this broader approach to better understand the overall impact on civilians, while also reflecting the US Department of Defense’s own new definition of civilian harm as outlined in their 2024 Instruction 3000.17:
Civilian casualties and damage to or destruction of civilian objects (which do not constitute military objectives under the law of war) resulting from military operations. As a matter of DoD policy, other adverse effects on the civilian population and the personnel, organizations, resources, infrastructure, essential services, and systems on which civilian life depends resulting from military operations are also considered in CHMR efforts to the extent practicable. These other adverse effects do not include mere inconveniences.
Since October 2023, Airwars has been exploring ways to expand our own methodology to encompass the wide-ranging harms to civilians in conflicts, beyond direct deaths and injuries. This has involved the development of an advanced codebook on civilian infrastructure, which can be found online in our new GitHub repository.
This broader approach to documentation is taken by Airwars in contexts where tempo allows, in order to provide a more complete picture of civilian harm.
Civilian Infrastructure
Incident identification and definition
As with claims of civilian casualties, incidents of attacks on civilian infrastructure have been identified from local or international reporting, or other open sources, whereby claims have a level of specificity with regards to time and location that allows for further inquiry.
Categorisation
Incidents of civilian infrastructure damage are categorized using our publicly available codebook, which disaggregates infrastructure into the following groups: agriculture; commerce; communications; cultural-site; education; emergency-services; financial; healthcare; humanitarian; idp-camp; legal; media; religious; residential; resources; transportation; vehicle; warehouse; water. A set of further disaggregated features are also defined in Airwars’ codebook, and include features such as agricultural-land, aid-convoys, airports etc.
These groups were identified and defined through a period of consultation with Airwars’ partners, and are subject to addition as this methodology evolves.
Grading
In line with Airwars’ standard methodology, while the U.S. military and the U.S. president have announced the general military operation under Operation Absolute Resolve, incidents will only be categorised as “declared” if officials acknowledge the specific events as identified. In some cases, munitions are identified by Airwars’ specialist team that strengthen the evidence base pointing to U.S. involvement. This will not affect the ‘declared’ grading, but will be included as supporting information in the assessment.
As the “civilian harm status” grading methodology is currently defined by Airwars as deaths or injuries to civilians, these broader incidents for now will be logged as “no” to civilian harm reported in our database. As this methodology evolves, this approach may be subject to change (in which case these incidents and this note will be updated accordingly).