The most horrible cases originate from the current region of Syria, a part of Ottoman Empire until the end of the war. The civilian casualties of Syria was covered in a detailed article (the whole of Greater Syria, and thus including Akkar) by Linda Schatkowski Schilcher.[16] Contributing to as many as 500,000 deaths of the civilians living in this region in the 1915–1917 period, the study lists eight basic factors: (a) the Entente powers' total blockage of the Syrian coast; (b) the inadequacy of the Ottoman supply strategy; deficient harvest and inclement weather; (c) diversion of supplies from Syria as a consequence of the Arab revolt; (d) the speculative frenzy of a number of unscrupulous local grain merchants; the callousness of German military official in Syria, and systematic hoarding by the population at large.[16] In a series of graphs and charts discovered in the Ottoman archives that date to 1915, Zachary J. Foster has shown that hundreds of Lebanese were starving to death or dying from starvation-related diseases (between 156 and 784) everyone month of the war from the fall 1915 onwards.[17]