Immediately after the militant group Boko Haram attacked areas surrounding the fishing town of Baga in Nigeria early this month, media outlets were accused of turning a blind eye to the crime — a sobering reflection of the challenges of reporting from northern Nigeria amid conflict, the lamentable lack of reliable access to communications on the ground and, for many, the sad state of what is deemed newsworthy nowadays.
Meanwhile, satellite images obtained by Human Rights Watch captured a clearer, albeit far from conclusive, picture of what happened: large-scale destruction in Doro Gowon, where the base of the Multinational Joint Task Force, a group that Nigeria, Chad and Niger started in 1998 initially to monitor crime within borders, and eventually, to conduct counterterrorism operations against Boko Haram, was located.
HRW started reviewing and analyzing the raw images it acquired from French government space agency CNES and satellite service provider Astrium — with which it has a commercial agreement — in 2012, the same year that Josh Lyons, its satellite imagery analyst, joined the group. While HRW had already been turning to satellite images to detect human rights abuses since the early 2000s, much of the analytical work of these images was done externally — a practice that proved impractical given the nuanced nature of scrutinizing satellite imagery.