| New York Times | - |
More than 76,000 people died in Syria's civil war in 2014, including more than 3,500 children, a monitoring group reported on Thursday.
More than 76,000 people died in Syria’s
civil war in 2014, 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.
The United Nations, which once regularly documented the numbers of dead
and wounded in Syria, discontinued the practice some time ago.
But
the United Nations said in December that more than 200,000 people had
been killed in the conflict, which began as an uprising against
President Bashar al-Assad and has since evolved into a civil war that
has destabilized the Middle East.
The Syrian Observatory’s 2014 casualty figures include 17,790 civilians, among them 3,501 children.
Photographs
The Historic Scale of Syria’s Refugee Crisis
Dramatic images from the Syrian refugee crisis, which
exploded to encompass six million people by October 2013.
The
rest include Syrian soldiers and allied militia members, rebel fighters
and members of jihadist militant organizations that have joined the
fighting.
The
Syrian Observatory’s total of 76,021 deaths for 2014 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 country’s public health system.
Last
month, the World Health Organization’s Syria representative, Elizabeth
Hoff, said the cumulative number of wounded was approximately one
million.
Ms. Hoff made the estimate as part of a United Nations annual appeal for funding at a donors conference in Berlin. The organization said it was seeking $8.4 billion in 2015 to help nearly 18 million victims of Syria’s conflict, mostly displaced civilians and refugees.
The
2014 casualty figures were issued as Syria’s state-run news agency
reported that Mr. 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 website showed Mr. Assad, minus his signature mustache, greeting his troops.
Antigovernment
activists said that they doubted that Mr. Assad had ventured into
Jobar, which they said was contested or rebel-controlled, and that the
images shown by the 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.
