While SJAC primary analysis methodology was designed to support criminal accountability processes, SJAC is also leading investigations into missing persons in Syria. This methodology guide is designed specifically to enable analysts to support these investigations using the Bayanat software. Although SJAC’s missing persons project focuses on identifying the fate and whereabouts of those who disappeared in formerly ISIS-controlled areas of Syria, the methodology can also be utilized for investigations into missing persons in different contexts.
SJAC has adopted a methodology that prioritizes identifying large-scale patterns of disappearance—by linking missing persons together—and narrowing the range of possible locations of individual missing persons. As explained further below, Bayanat allows for such analysis through the development and linking of Location, Actor, and Incident pages. The initial basis for these pages are Bulletins that analysts will generate and which can correspond to a range of documentation including interview data, whether from interviews with families of the missing, survivors of detention, or insider witnesses; documents like arrest and detainee transfer orders; generated material like field reports and satellite imagery analysis; and open-source information available in public media reports and social media content.
This guide explains how analysts should generate Bulletins for documentation, and then how to build Location, Actor, and finally Incident pages from those Bulletins. Readers should first consult the main SJAC analysis methodology, since this guide does not discuss those aspects of data analysis that are common to all areas of SJAC’s work (e.g., assigning labels for violations).
Missing Person: An individual who is out of contact and whose fate and whereabouts are unknown to their family, friends, colleagues, etc.
Fate and whereabouts: As defined by leading missing persons investigators, “fate refers to the state or condition of the person (alive or dead), while whereabouts relates to the person’s journey and the circumstances that led to that state (fate) and location.” Individual missing persons should never be assumed dead until remains have been located and identified.
Detention Facility: Any location where one or more people were detained against their will, regardless of the length of time; this includes formal prisons, holding centers, training camps, private homes, etc.
Gravesite: Any location where human remains have been discovered, including formal and informal burial sites as well as unburied remains. This may include individual graves as well as mass graves (holding the remains of more than one person).
Analysts will manually create Bulletins for every piece of documentation used in missing persons investigations. Note that while Bayanat allows for the automatic generation of Actor pages for missing persons for whom there is interview data in an excel form, analysts will still need to create corresponding Bulletins for these interviews. This allows for analysts and investigators to distinguish between the different pieces of documentation that might comprise a given Actor page, as well as to easily refer to those pieces of documentation (e.g., in an Incident description page). The steps below concern analysis of interview data, documents, and generated material; please consult the main SJAC methodology for the standard procedure for generating Bulletins for open-source material.
After generating Bulletins, analysts should ensure that there are specific Location pages for the sites that are mentioned in a piece of documentation. In missing persons work these pages are known as “points of interest,” and are distinct from the normal administrative locations available that analysts usually tag Bulletins with. Point-of-interest Location pages allow analysts to collate information about a specific site (e.g., a detention facility, execution site, gravesite, etc.) and link that site to geographic coordinates that are much more specific and accurate than the general administrative locations. Since points of interest tend to recur in documentation about disappearances ongoing in a given area (e.g., the Raqqa Municipal Stadium Prison Complex), as analysts begin to generate point-of-interest Location pages they will increasingly be able to immediately tag Bulletins (as well as relevant Actors and Incidents) to these locations. interest will have already been logged as Locations prior to DA work.
After generating Location pages for points of interest, analysts can begin building Actor pages for the missing persons and survivors who are at the heart of investigations into enforced disappearances. The primary work of building Actor pages for missing persons and survivors entails manually generating Events for the various events that made up a disappearance or detention. Such Events will then inform the search queries that analysts and investigators conduct on Bayanat to identify patterns of disappearance.
There are several qualifications to note here. First, because Actor pages in this context serve the specific investigative purpose of identifying patterns of detention and disappearance, it is not feasible to build out Events for Actor pages for alleged perpetrators; as such, the process involved in generating these pages are the same follows that laid out in the standard SJAC data analysis methodology. Alleged perpetrators were likely involved in numerous instances of arrest, detention, execution, and/or release that would normally be considered an Event on the Actor page of a missing person or survivor; and therefore, the role of these alleged perpetrators will primarily be visible through Related Actor and Incident searches. Indeed, even the decision to generate Actor pages for alleged perpetrators may vary from one investigation to the next. In SJAC’s own missing persons work, for example, analysts only create Actor pages for alleged perpetrators if there is identifying information for these individuals and entities.
Second, no Actor pages should be created for insider witnesses since they may have only been interviewed because they provided information about a point of interest and were not subject to detention themselves. If insider witness interviews do happen to provide information about the detention or disappearance of specific individuals, this can be captured in the Events of those Actor pages and linked to the Bulletin for the insider witness.
Third and relatedly, from the outset the decision to generate Actor pages for any individuals whatsoever may depend on the security considerations of particular investigations and require various degrees of redaction. In SJAC’s own work, for example, the names of almost every individual except for those still believed to be missing have been redacted.
Finally, in missing persons work SJAC will use the new Consolidated Actor Tool to continuously update Actor pages to reflect new or more accurate sources of information about an individual’s disappearance and/or detention; this is a departure from the “closed universe” principle of SJAC’s standard methodology. Yet while Actor pages will eventually incorporate a range of Bulletins (e.g., social media posts about an arrest; video of a detainee execution), interview data will likely remain the initial and primary documentation for almost all missing persons and survivors
As in SJAC’s standard methodology, Incident pages in the missing persons context gather evidence about a violation that has been documented across multiple Bulletins. Although most missing persons analysis occurs through Actor queries that identify large-scale patterns of detention and disappearance over time, analysts can analyze use the Incident tool to understand specific events (e.g., a mass arrest). The objective is not to duplicate data found in Bulletins and Actor pages but to integrate data found across these spaces and generate new conclusions. Note that sometimes the need to generate Incidents will be obvious, for example if multiple members of the same family were arrested. In other instances, however, the Incident will only become clear as analysts process a number of Bulletins that were collected independently but all concern the same events (e.g., armed clashes in which members of the same units were last seen).
The scope of Incidents may vary from one context to the next. In SJAC’s own work, analysts only generate Incidents for a discrete event or chain of events that implicated a group of people. Concretely, “discrete” refers to when more than one person was arrested/detained or went missing in the same place and time or in the same context. Instances of mass abduction/arrest or mass death (e.g., because of an airstrike on a building where multiple missing persons were reportedly being held) will likely be the most common kinds of Incidents generated while processing missing persons data. Yet, while the emphasis is on relatively discrete instances of mass arrest/disappearance, it could be the case that disappearances were meaningfully related to one another but occurred at different times. For example, in SJAC’s own work, analysts would generate Incident pages for cases in which two people were arrested several months apart but for their alleged involvement in the same “crime” (e.g., smuggling a Syrian Arab Army conscript soldier out of an area ISIS control). Analysts would not do so, however, for cases in which the ISIS morality police arrested two different people for the same generic “crime” of blasphemy. Nor would analysts generate Incidents when families hear that missing relatives were held at the same facility as a person later released from the facility, since there would not be a meaningful connection between the two Actors; they could simply be Related Actors.