THE fog of war frustrates statisticians: knowing for sure how many Syrians have died can seem as difficult as brokering a lasting peace. The last precise death toll published by the UN was 191,369 in August 2014, followed by an estimate of more than 250,000 in August 2015. But it then stopped updating the figure because of dwindling sources of good information. On February 11th the Syrian Centre for Policy Research (SCPR), a non-profit group, claimed that the true figure is now almost double that estimate at about 470,000.
This number may seem large, but even the UN emphasised that its figures were conservative. It erred on the side of rigour rather than completeness, and only counted people whose names it knew and whose deaths were confirmed by more than one source.
Extreme conditions have forced more approximate approaches. The SCPR divided Syria into 700 regions, and asked three local experts in each to give detailed information. If one gave an answer more than 10% apart from the others, they were replaced with two different “informants”. Rabie Nasser, an author of the report, says resampling happened in only about 10% of...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1Oi5ITo
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