Saturday, December 5, 2015

Airstrikes in Syria & what we suspected.

Compilation of Airstrikes Against ISIS November 2015 Week 2

As the RuAF Su-24s, Su-25s and Su-34s deliver their unguided and guided munitions on ISIS (and, according to some reports, Free Syrian Army) targets there is some concern that the lack of coordination with the US-led coalition may cause some trouble sooner or later.
See More > http://theaviationist.com/2015/10/02/heres-an-interactive-map-of-all-the-russian-airstrikes-in-syria/

Bellingcat began geolocating and independently verifying videos published by the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) after initial reports from the ground indicated that Russian airstrikes destroyed positions held by the Free Syrian Army and other groups rather than the Islamic State (or ISIS). Bellingcat has geolocated, verified, and visualized each airstrike published by the Russian MoD on its official YouTube channel as of 25 October. The outcome of our work is unequivocal: the overwhelming majority of Russian airstrikes have targeted positions held by non-ISIS rebel groups posing a more immediate threat to the Syrian regime and its head, Bashar al-Assad. In contrast, ISIS strongholds have rarely been attacked: out of 60 strikes recorded on video, only one has been confirmed to be both at the location indicated by the MoD and against ISIS; 14 other strikes said to target ISIS were, indeed, geolocated to the claimed locations, but none of those areas are known to be under ISIS control.

The Russian Federation launched an air campaign on 30 September 2015, allegedly targeting Islamic State (or ISIS) positions in Syria. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has been releasing selected videos on its YouTube channel ever since. Bellingcat began geolocating and independently verifyingvideos published by the Russian MoD after initial reports from the ground indicated that Russian airstrikes have instead destroyed positions held by the Free Syrian Army and other groups rather than ISIS.

Bellingcat has geolocated, verified, and visualised each airstrike published by the Russian MoD on its official YouTube channel as of 25 October. The outcome of our work is unequivocal: the overwhelming majority of Russian airstrikes have targeted positions held by non-ISIS rebel groups posing a more immediate threat to the Syrian regime and its head, Bashar al-Assad. In contrast, ISIS strongholds have rarely been attacked. The methodology and results of the investigation are laid out below.

Geolocating Russian Airstrikes in Syria

We noticed that, for many videos, the Russian MoD adds a description in Russian before the video of the strike itself begins. A longer, more in-depth description is also appended to each upload, along with the title of the video. For the verification process, each video was uploaded to Bellingcat’s Checkdesk verification project. We Google-translated the description and pasted the original one in Russian alongside to keep track of the information in an independently managed online space.

Once this preliminary step is completed, the verification process is turned “on” which enables crowdsourced public discussion and proof-gathering. For each video, a series of details are collected and verified; these are:

the claimed location;
the claimed target;
the presence of ISIS in the area;
the claimed date of the strike;
and the date of upload. The exact upload time was determined usingAmnesty International’s YouTube DataViewer.

From these details and crowdsourced geolocation efforts, the actual target of the strike was established and an error was defined. The latter describes eithera mismatch between the claimed and the actual location of the attack or the absence/presence of ISIS in the bombed area or mention of ISIS in title/description of the video.

More at > http://tinyurl.com/ouk33j6