Anna Neistat, leader of a HRW team investigating the humanitarian damage in South Ossetia, told The Guardian that their investigators had recorded cases of Ossetian fighters burning and looting Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali. "The torching of houses in these villages is in some ways a result of the massive Russia propaganda machine which constantly repeats claims of genocide and exaggerates the scale of casualties," she said, adding, "That is then used to justify retribution." She also said that the Russian estimates of 2,000 dead was "suspicious" and "very doubtful".[18] The South Ossetians later claimed that 1,492 were killed as the result of the bombing of Tskhinvali.[19][20]