World Trouble Spots
SYRIA — ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER
The Syrian civil war has been raging since 2011.
The United Nations has verified that at least 350,209 civilians and combatants were killed between March 2011 and March 2021, but it has warned that it is an “undercount of the actual number”.
UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said 26,727 victims were women and 27,126 were children.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group with a network of sources on the ground, had documented the deaths of 494,438 people by June 2021. It said at least 159,774 civilians had been killed, with the Syrian government and its allies responsible for most of those deaths.
The group estimated that the actual toll from the war was more than 606,000, saying 47,000 civilians were believed to have died of torture in government-run prisons and that it had been unable to document almost 53,000 reported deaths due to a lack of information.
Another monitoring group, the Violations Documentation Center, which relies on information from activists across the country, had documented 238,716 battle-related deaths, including 144,956 civilians, as of February 2022. It attributed 165,490 of those deaths to Syrian government forces and 35,610 to opposition factions.
