Airwars
Open Society Foundations/RecipientsNGO
| Airwars link () Website | |
|---|---|
| Formation | 2014 |
| Founder | Chris Woods |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
| Type | NGO |
Airwars is a British NGO funded by the Open Society Foundations and other donors. The purpose of this monitoring site is to control the war narrative taking charge of counting casualties. The method used is applying broad, but yet strict and selective, criteria for the sources used.
Emily Tripp, Executive Director of Airwars, gave compelling and detailed testimony – about the thousands of civilian casualties caused by Israeli genocide – to the first session of The Gaza Tribunal on 4 September 2025.[1]
Mission
Monitoring and assessing civilian harm from airpower-dominated international military actions. Seeking transparency and accountability from belligerents, and advocating on behalf of affected non-combatants. Archiving open-source casualty reports, and military claims by nations.
Methodology
Airwars draws on a number of information sources including NGOs, monitoring groups such as the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), international and local news agencies, social media sites including local residents’ groups, in-country researchers, Facebook pages, YouTube footage of incidents, tweets relating to specific events and from military and other government sources.
This wide range of sources gives ample room to fiddle the statistics, minimizing civilian casualties from Western airstrikes, while increasing Russian, Syrian etc. victims.
Board
The board is full of people with obvious and deep ties to the military apparatus. [2]
Financial backers
The key donors include the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, since 2015. Funding from the Open Society Foundations supports Airwars' work in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The NGO also employ a full-time researcher in the Netherlands focused on Dutch and Belgian airstrikes and transparency – funded by Stichting Democratie en Media.