News / Syria

Over 215,000 people killed in Syria conflict: Group

Sunday, 15 March 2015 5:59 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 15 March 2015 5:59 PM ]

An injured Syrian boy receives treatment northeast of the capital, Damascus, February 6, 2015 (© AFP)

A London-based monitoring group says it has documented the deaths of 215,518 people in Syria since March 2011, when the Syrian conflict began.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said out of the total figure, 66,000 were civilians, including 10,808 children and nearly 7,000 women.

The group added that some 5,000 people have been killed in the past five weeks alone, as the Syrian conflict entered its fifth year.

The group’s director, Rami Abdel Rahman, said the figures do not reflect the exact number of the people killed, as several thousands of the victims of the conflict have not been identified.

The fate of many thousands more who have been kidnapped also remains unknown, Rahman said.

Meanwhile, a recent UN-ordered report entitled “Syria: Alienation and Violence, Impact of the Syria Crisis,” has been released, detailing the “crushing” impact of the 4-year Syrian conflict.

The report, authored by the Syrian Center for Policy Research and released on March 10, says the war in Syria has reduced the life expectancy in the country by 20 years, and plunged 80 percent of its people into poverty. The conflict has also caused damages worth over $200 billion since it began, according to the report.

It has also resulted in the “systematic collapse and destruction” of Syria’s economic foundations, infrastructure, institutions, it said.

The report said 30 percent of Syria’s population has plunged into abject poverty and is struggling to meet their basic food-related needs.

Syria’s population dropped from 20.87 million in 2010 to just 17.65 million at the end of last year.

Some 3.33 million Syrians have taken refuge in other countries, while 6.8 million fled their homes but are still in Syria.

The report said education in Syria is also “in a state of collapse,” with 50.8 percent of school-age children having been no-shows during the 2014-2015 school year.

Human rights groups and humanitarian relief agencies from around the world have unanimously criticized the global policymakers, the United Nations Security Council in particular, for failing to take decisive and unified action to resolve the ongoing and massive humanitarian crisis in Syria.

The Takfiri militants who have wreaked havoc across Syria are backed by the US and its Western and regional allies as part of attempts to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

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Syrian Observatory for Human Rights