Airwars

Airwars   (Open Society Foundations/Recipients)
Formation	2014
Founder	Chris Woods
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Type	NGO

Airwars is a British NGO funded by the Open Society Foundations and other donors. The purpose of this monitoring site is to control the war narrative taking charge of counting causalities. The method (trick) used is applying broad, but yet strict and selective, criteria for the sources used.

Mission

Monitoring and assessing civilian harm from airpower-dominated international military actions. Seeking transparency and accountability from belligerents, and advocating on behalf of affected non-combatants. Archiving open-source casualty reports, and military claims by nations.

Methodology

Airwars draws on a number of information sources including NGOs, monitoring groups such as the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), international and local news agencies, social media sites including local residents’ groups, in-country researchers, Facebook pages, YouTube footage of incidents, tweets relating to specific events and from military and other government sources.

This wide range of sources gives ample room to fiddle the statistics, minimizing civilian casualties from Western airstrikes, while increasing Russian, Syrian etc. victims.

Board

The board is full of people with obvious and deep ties to the military apparatus.

Financial backers

The key donors include the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, since 2015. Funding from the Open Society Foundations supports Airwars' work in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The NGO also employ a full-time researcher in the Netherlands focused on Dutch and Belgian airstrikes and transparency – funded by Stichting Democratie en Media.

 

Employee on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End
Tareq Haddad	Journalist	April 2017	August 2017

Rating

17 January 2020 Terje  Low-balling death statistics

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