The chaos in trusted figures and statistics: to trust local figures or the international one?

Many advanced countries rely on general and specialised committees created by such nations to track changes in society and prepare statistical studies to help with policy or decision making. Such practices prepare these nations to estimate the size of problems or the required resources and funding for future projects, projects that are usually humongous in nature. On top of that they also prepare and allocate the required talents and human resources to verify and analyse the large amount of data coming through, providing them with what the required advanced machines and tools.

On the individual level, statistics and percentages have always helped the individual convince the other of their argument or proving a point. As well as helping the individual predict the future with more accuracy and precision, especially if such figures relied on a disciplined and precise scientific method.

Nevertheless, statistics and figures have been weaponised by some governmental institutions, institutions that would like to hide the real figures or manipulate them for political motives, or even to discredit certain narratives and create a state of chaos, destroying the opponent’s credibility and reducing their gains.

Figures and statistics have been weaponised in Syria since 2011, by both Assad’s regime and the revolutionary and opposition forces to discredit the other’s narrative. On one side Assad’s regime has inflated its gains and exaggerated the other side’s losses, and on the other hand the revolutionary forces have also exaggerated in their estimations, to the point where it became difficult to have any kind of consensus around statistics or figures with regards to the numbers of political prisoners or martyrs as an example.

With the exacerbation of the humanitarian situation in Syria, the need for trustworthy reliable and updated statistics has never been greater. Not to mention the need for specialised teams that preform routine and regular updates of the losses and the type and amount of aid needed, as well as tracking the displacement of Syria’s population and its new geographical distribution due to the forced displacement policy practiced by Assad’s regime against Syrians. This type information and data is considered the primal building block to design and plan emergency response operations as well as distribution of aid.

Despite all the efforts spent in this direction throughout the previous years by many organisations and teams specifically trained in this field, with vast experiences and tools that should enable them to deal with an ever-changing dynamic arena with areas that are hard to reach; the Syrian people still suffer from unreliable statistics and figures with unacceptable error margins. Indeed, to this date figures coming from international organisations seem to be more reliable than local figures when it comes to producing reports by various organisations, even though the latter should be more trustworthy in some cases.

To clarify the idea, we can take the example of a question that many people would have a quick answer to, “What is the population of the northern and north-western regions of Syria?” as a case study of a topic that many organisations have tried to tackle and give a numerical estimate to. We will discuss their answers and how precise and truthful they are, as well as how close they are to the reality of the situation. In an effort to verify and weigh the figures provided, perhaps going through the various reports will clarify the disparity between their numbers and estimations, estimations that should the basis for emergency humanitarian intervention policies.

This report relies on gathering statistics from secondary sources such as publications and reports published on UN platforms, discussing their results and methodology through interviews with several organisations or institutions specialised in data gathering and statistics in humanitarian fields.

The importance of this report comes from its attempt to shed a light on a critical problem that could diminish many gains made by the Syrian revolutionary forces, and burn some cards that could be otherwise played in the Syrian people’s favour, as well as predicting the implications and effects that imprecision in estimations has on the humanitarian and political levels, namely the process of strategic planning and designing early recovery projects as well as the upcoming process of rebuilding Syria. All this will be clarified later in the report.