More than 76,000 people died in Syria’s civil war last year, including more than 3,500 children, a monitoring group reported on Thursday. The figures would make last year the deadliest in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011.
The figures from the monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, put the total number of dead in the conflict as of Wednesday at 206,603.
The group, based in Britain, uses a network of contacts inside Syria to tally casualties and its figures cannot be independently corroborated.
Photo: AFP
The UN, which once regularly documented the numbers of dead and wounded in Syria, discontinued the practice some time ago, but it said last month that more than 200,000 people had been killed in the conflict, which began as an uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and has since evolved into a civil war that has destabilized the Middle East.
The observatory’s casualty figures include 17,790 civilians, among them 3,501 children. The rest include Syrian soldiers and allied militia members, rebel fighters and members of militant organizations that have joined the fighting.
The observatory’s total of 76,021 deaths for last year compared with its total of 73,447 in 2013, 49,294 in 2012 and 7,841 in 2011.
The number of wounded in the Syria conflict has been even harder to determine, partly because of restricted access to combat zones and the collapse of the nation’s public health system.
Last month, the WHO’s Syria representative, Elizabeth Hoff, said the cumulative number of wounded was approximately 1 million.
Hoff made the estimate as part of a UN annual appeal for funding at a donors conference in Berlin. The organization said it was seeking US$8.4 billion this year to help nearly 18 million victims of Syria’s conflict, mostly displaced civilians and refugees.
The casualty figures were issued as Syria’s state-run news agency reported that al-Assad, in a New Year’s Eve morale-boosting gesture, had visited soldiers on the front lines in Jobar, an embattled suburb of Damascus. Images posted on the news agency’s Web site showed al-Assad minus his signature mustache, greeting his troops.
Anti-government activists said that they doubted that al-Assad had ventured into Jobar, which they said was contested or rebel-controlled, and that the images shown by state media appeared to be from Zablatani, a government-held area nearby.
Some images showed a building with a sign that read Damascus Transportation Department and several Damascus residents said they knew of such a building in Zablatani, not in Jobar.
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