JEDDAH: A total of 306,887 civilians have been killed in the war in Syria since March 2011, about 1.5 percent of its pre-war population, the UN human rights office said on Tuesday.
The latest death toll, based on eight information sources and covering the first 10 years of the conflict through to March 2021, amounts to an average of 83 deaths every day, of whom 18 were children.
“The extent of civilian casualties in the past 10 years represents a staggering 1.5 per cent of the total population of the Syrian Arab Republic at the beginning of the conflict, raising serious concerns as to the failure of the parties to the conflict to respect international humanitarian law norms on the protection of civilians,” the UN report said.
The estimate is still thought to represent “only a portion of all deaths,” the report said, because it included only those who died as a direct result of the war and not indirect deaths from lack of healthcare or access to food or water. It also did not include non-civilian deaths.
UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet said its latest analysis would give a “clearer sense of the severity and scale of the conflict.”
In a separate report, the UN said more than 100 people, including many women, had been murdered in the Al-Hol camp in northeast Syria in the past 18 months. The camp was increasingly unsafe and children there werebeing condemned to a life with no future, said Imran Riza, the UN resident coordinator in Syria.
Al-Hol was meant as a temporary detention facility but still holds about 56,000 people, mostly Syrians and Iraqis, some of whom maintain links with Daesh. The rest are citizens of other countries, including children and other relatives of Daesh fighters.
“It’s a very harsh place,” Riza said. “There's a great deal of gender-based violence, there’s a lot of no-go areas.”
