- Date of Incident
- 08 Mar 2015
- Location
- Atimah, Syria
- Publication Date
- 16 Feb 2016
- Commissioned By
- Airwars
- Additional Funding
- None
- Collaborators
- Airwars
- Methodologies
- Geolocation
- Forums
- Exhibition, Media
- Exhibitions
- Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, Forensic Architecture: Hacia una Estética Investigativa, Affect Me: Social Media Images in Art, The Urban-Data Complex, Report: Notes From Reality, Situation #82: Bomb Cloud Atlas, Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design, Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design at C-mine, Les usages du monde – New ways of the World, Impasse des Lilas (MBL Architectes), A Show of Affection—Collection Constellation 1
On 8 March 2015, three bombs landed near the Turkey-Syria border, between the town of Atimah, Syria and a nearby internally displaced persons (IDP) camp, where more than thirty thousand civilians were sheltered.
No military force claimed responsibility for the attack. Forensic Architecture (FA) and Airwars together determined it was likely to be a US strike on al-Qaeda militants who operated in the area.
The analysis sought to confirm the exact location of each strike. People in the camp and in Atimah photographed the bomb clouds shortly after the strike, and uploaded their images and videos to the internet. We verified two sources to be of the same strike, from different perspectives—one from the town and the other from the IDP camp.
We reconstructed the cameras’ locations and their cone of vision, and intersected these perspectives to locate the strike. Comparing the size of the smoke plumes with those of other known bombs in our archive, we estimated that these were one ton bombs.