About Dahsas

Why this exists

There is no shortage of information about this war. There is a shortage of information you can rely on. Claims move faster than anyone can check them, every side has an interest in what you believe, and the same wire story reprinted by nine outlets looks like nine sources confirming each other.

Dahsas is built around one idea: separate what is known from what is claimed, show the working, and say plainly when the answer is that we do not know. That last part is the hard one, and it is the reason to trust the rest.

Who runs it

Dahsas is produced by the Dahsas team. We are independent, not funded by any government, party, or armed group, and not aligned with any side in this conflict.

What you can expect

• We publish slowly. A record appears when there is something to say about it, not when it would get attention.
• We rate confidence on a published scale with fixed probability bands, so our words mean the same thing every time.
• Source entries show available archives and archiving gaps. Our editorial publication standard requires archives because posts get deleted and news stories get rewritten.
• We state the limits of our own evidence. When a satellite could not have seen the thing in question, we say so rather than letting a blank result look like a finding.
• Every record carries its revision history. When we are wrong, we mark it on the record instead of quietly editing it.

What we will not do

We do not publish precise coordinates for active military positions, and we do not publish anything that could identify the person who filmed or photographed something. We do not adjudicate claims we have no means to check — where foreign involvement is asserted, we record who is asserting it and leave it unresolved rather than take a side by implication.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it on the record. A correction is not an embarrassment; publishing a mistake and leaving it is.

Credits

Photographs

Establishing photographs are pictures of a place, never of an event. Every card marks them as a file photo, and satellite imagery of the actual area always takes precedence over them.

• Addis Ababa — DFID - UK Department for International Development, CC BY 2.0. Wikimedia Commons
• North-eastern Ethiopia from orbit — European Space Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0 igo. Wikimedia Commons
• The Bab el-Mandeb strait, between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, from orbit — Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center, Public domain. Wikimedia Commons
• Bahir Dar, Amhara — A.Savin, FAL. Wikimedia Commons
• Bishoftu, Oromia — Nina R from Africa, CC BY 2.0. Wikimedia Commons
• Cairo, Egypt — Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0. Wikimedia Commons
• The road between Asmara and Massawa, Eritrea — Hansueli Krapf, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons
• Addis Ababa — Simfan34, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons
• United Nations headquarters, New York — Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons
• Wukro, eastern Tigray — Evan Williams, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons