Syria town database

The purpose of this dataset is to provide a detailed picture of the characteristics of Syrian towns in the years preceding the 2011 Syrian uprising and ensuing civil war. It incorporates the 2004 national census, the last before the uprising, and a newly collected set of data on ethnic identity. The level of analysis is the town (the Syrian Census Bureau’s fourth administrative level).

TECHNICAL NOTE: The .csv files in this data package contain both Arabic and English, so are encoded in UTF-8. The Arabic script should render if opened directly in Open Office, Numbers, Google Drive, or R statistical software. To read the Arabic in Excel, you can open the .csv file in any of these applications and save it as an .xlsx file, or open it through Excel using the following steps:

(1) open a blank excel document
(2) import the data using “Data -> Get External Data -> Import text file”
(3) select “File Origin: Unicode (UTF-8)”
(4) select “Delimiters: comma”
(5) select the top left cell to place the data

See the following post for further details: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6002256/is-it-possible-to-force-excel-recognize-utf-8-csv-files-automatically