Correlations and forecast of death tolls in the Syrian conflict

Abstract

The Syrian armed conflict has been ongoing since 2011 and has already caused thousands of deaths. The analysis of death tolls helps to understand the dynamics of the conflict and to better allocate resources and aid to the affected areas. In this article, we use information on the daily number of deaths to study temporal and spatial correlations in the data, and exploit this information to forecast events of deaths. We found that the number of violent deaths per day in Syria varies more widely than that in England in which non-violent deaths dominate. We have identified strong positive auto-correlations in Syrian cities and non-trivial cross-correlations across some of them. The results indicate synchronization in the number of deaths at different times and locations, suggesting respectively that local attacks are followed by more attacks at subsequent days and that coordinated attacks may also take place across different locations. Thus the analysis of high temporal resolution data across multiple cities makes it possible to infer attack strategies, warn potential occurrence of future events, and hopefully avoid further deaths.

Global, regional, and national age-sex-specific mortality for 282 causes of death in 195 countries and territories, 1980–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

“…Conflict-related deaths represent the fastest growing cause of injury-related deaths. Since 2007, conflicts have resulted in 1·14 million deaths, concentrated in the North Africa and Middle East region 34 . Parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America are also experiencing increasing rates of conflict-related deaths since 2007.…”

Conflict-Related Population Health Research in Syria, 2011-2019: An Assessment of Information Gaps, Research Needs and Challenges, for The Lancet - AUB Commission on Syria

“…Several papers interviewed humanitarian workers, including humanitarian health staff working on non-communicable disease (NCD) care in Syria (Garry, Checchi et al 2018) and those involved in the cross-border humanitarian health response from Turkey (Duclos, Ekzayez et al 2019, Fradejas-Garcia 2019).Fourteen papers research health issues related to war strategies and alleged IHL violations, including an expert panel review of YouTube videos following a sarin gas attack(Rosman, Eisenkraft et al 2014) and interviews with healthcare workers in opposition-controlled areas regarding attacks on healthcare and challenges and experiences in responding to chemical attacks(Footer, Clouse et al 2018). Other research in this theme examined attacks on health care(Elamein, Bower et al 2017, Fouad, Sparrow et al 2017, Haar, Risko et al 2018, Wong and Chen 2018, Ri, Blair et al 2019), areas under or the effects of siege (Sahloul, Salem et al 2017, Morrison 2018, Fardousi, Douedari et al 2019), and war-related mortality (Guha-Sapir, Rodriguez-Llanes et al 2015, Chen, Shrivastava et al 2018, Guha-Sapir, Schlüter et al 2018, Ri, Blair et al 2019) including a study of characteristics of deceased victims of a chemical weapons attack (Rodriguez-Llanes, Guha-Sapir et al 2018).Mortality is the subject of ten papers, which report mortality counts provided by key informants in contested and opposition areas(Diggle, Welsch et al 2017); examine mortality data documented by the Violations Documentation Centre (VDC) (Guha-Sapir, Rodriguez-Llanes et al 2015, Guha-Sapir, Schlüter et al 2018, Rodriguez-Llanes, Guha-Sapir et al 2018)), examine associations between attacks on healthcare and civilian casualties(Ri, Blair et al 2019) or con rm con ict events in a fake-news data set (Abu Salem, Al Feel et al 2019); use capture-recapture methods on four data sets to estimate mortality in two governorates(Price, Gohdes et al 2015); estimate the number of unique identi able deaths by deduplicating four data sets(Chen, Shrivastava et al 2018); use spatio-temporal death data to forecast con ict events(Fujita, Shinomoto et al 2017) and report on a household survey of IDPs in Raqqa and retrospective one-year mortality, largely con ict-related deaths(Vernier, Cramond et al 2019).…”

Conflict-related health research in Syria, 2011–2019: a scoping review for The Lancet - AUB Commission on Syria

“…Mortality is the subject of ten papers, which report mortality counts provided by key informants in contested and opposition areas [ 32 ]; examine mortality data documented by the Violations Documentation Centre (VDC) [ 15 , 51 , 62 ]), examine associations between attacks on healthcare and civilian casualties [ 90 ] or confirm conflict events against war-related deaths from VDC in a fake-news dataset [ 69 ]; use capture-recapture methods on four datasets to estimate mortality in two governorates [ 16 ]; estimate the number of unique identifiable deaths by deduplicating four datasets [ 45 ]; use spatio-temporal death data to forecast conflict events [ 37 ] and report on a household survey of IDPs in Raqqa and retrospective one-year mortality, largely conflict-related deaths [ 94 ].…”