| New York Times (blog) | - |
LONDON - An opposition monitoring group that has tracked Syria's
widening civil war said on Wednesday that more than 100,000 people had
died in the 27-month-old conflict, with pro-government forces taking far
more casualties than rebels seeking the ...
Syrian Group Says War Deaths Top 100,000
By ALAN COWELL
Published: June 26, 2013
LONDON — An opposition monitoring group that has tracked Syria’s
widening civil war said on Wednesday that more than 100,000 people had
died in the 27-month-old conflict, with pro-government forces taking far
more casualties than rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar
al-Assad, while civilians accounted for more than one-third of the
overall fatalities, the biggest single category.
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The group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in
Britain and relies on a network of activists in Syria for its
information, put the total number of dead at 100,191 since the Syrian
revolt began in March, 2011 — several thousand more than the newest
United Nations estimate of at least 93,000 by the end of April.
Rami Abdul Rahman, the founder of the Syrian Observatory, said in a
telephone interview that the statistics were compiled by adding together
the daily tallies his organization has kept since the beginning of the
uprising.
Those daily figures, in turn, he said, were based on information from a
variety of sources like the organization’s activists on the ground in
Syria, lawyers and health workers in civilian and military hospitals,
rather than from combatants whose estimates could be unreliable.
Throughout the Syrian conflict, both sides have sought advantage in
propaganda and media campaigns that have figured prominently alongside
physical combat.
“In war, both sides lie,” Mr. Abdul Rahman said, citing examples of
exaggerated death tolls that were not corroborated by evidence from
activists, and other cases when people who died of natural causes were
listed as combat deaths. His group also said both sides were likely to
have under-reported their own casualties.
The United Nations’ and opposition group’s estimates offered the caveat
that the true scale of the killing may be much greater.
“The death toll does not include more than 10,000 detainees and missing
persons inside of regime prisons, nor does it include more than 2,500
regular soldiers and pro-regime militants held captive by rebel
fighters,” the Syrian Observatory said in a statement on its Web site.
“We also estimate that the real number of casualties from regular forces
and rebel fighters is twice the number documented, because both sides
are discreet about the human losses resulting from clashes,” the
statement added.
In its breakdown, the group said the dead included 36,661 civilians,
including 8,000 women and children, 13,539 rebel fighters and 2,015
defectors from government forces. It was not immediately clear from the
statement how the civilians died.
Among pro-government forces, the group said 25,407 regular soldiers had
been killed along with 17,311 members of militias and pro-government
units including some listed as informers for the government.
The war has drawn in an unknown number of foreign militants and outside
fighters, including Lebanese Hezbollah forces. The figures released
Wednesday said the dead included more than 2,500 unidentified and
non-Syrian combatants on the rebel side and 169 fighters from Hezbollah.
The figures suggested that, among combatants, the number of
pro-government casualties was almost more than twice as high as those
among the rebels and their foreign allies.
Earlier this year, Mr. Abdul Rahman, who fled Syria 13 years ago, said
his network relied on four men inside Syria who help to report and
collate information from more than 230 activists on the ground. His group is based in the English Midlands city of Coventry and operates out of a semidetached redbrick house on a residential street.
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