(Image: “Mimosa” by rofi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
We are pleased to announce that our coverage of police, military and other security forces dramatically expands to 10 new countries. This massive update focuses on countries that participated in the Saudi-Emirati coalition in Yemen (Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates). In particular, we have drawn on public sources to comprehensively track the participation of individual units in both Operation Decisive Storm and Operation Restoring Hope. We also cover the forces of the government of Yemen and some of the armed groups in Yemen.
This new research will serve as the basis for analysis in the coming weeks exploring the air campaign of the Saudi-Emirati coalition in Yemen and we look forward to helping civil society leverage this information to support their investigations, reporting and advocacy.
Additionally, we have published new information on the security forces of Mauritania and Mali, covering the locations, areas of operations and commanders of these forces starting in roughly 2012. Our aim is that this information will be incorporated in the many efforts focused on the conduct of these forces.
Also contained in this update is greatly expanded information on the Philippine National Police (PNP), with the number of personnel almost doubling since our PNP data was used in an investigation by the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.
While the count of countries, units, personnel and incidents have all increased, another important metric to note is that the depth of our information has grown tremendously. This latest update roughly doubles the number of access points used in the data.
As always, our mission is to support accountability efforts and so we welcome outreach from civil society, journalists, litigators and others working to hold security forces accountable. We also invite any questions or critiques of our data as well. Please get in touch with us at: info (at) securityforcemonitor.org