Rights Group Enlists 'Strike Trackers' To Update Civilian Death Toll In Syria's Raqqa

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 22nd November, 2018) Thousands of digital activists are being recruited to crowd source data on civilian deaths during a four-month campaign in 2017 to oust the Islamic State (banned in Russia) from the terrorist group's self-declared capital of Raqqa, Syria, Amnesty International said in a press release on Wednesday.

"There is a mountain of evidence left to sift through, and the scale of the civilian devastation is simply too large for us to do this alone," Senior Adviser for Tactical Research on Amnesty International's Crisis Response team Milena Marin said in the release. "With thousands of 'Strike Trackers' on the case to help us narrow down precisely when and where Coalition air and artillery strikes destroyed buildings, we can significantly scale up our ability to map out the apocalyptic destruction in Raqqa.

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Previous field investigations and analysis by Amnesty International since the battle for Raqqa ended in October 2017 have already prompted the US-led coalition to increase estimates of civilian deaths from 23 to more than 100, the release said.

United Nations data shows that more than 10,000 buildings in Raqqa were destroyed or damaged over the course of the battle for the liberation of the city in 2017, the release added.

Amnesty International explained that "Strike Tracker" will call anyone with a mobile phone or laptop help to narrow down the timeframe of the destruction of each building from months to weeks - or even days.

Volunteers will track a building across a timeline of satellite images during the battle, looking for changes and marking the dates before and after a building's destruction, according to the release.