With 2017 coming to an end,the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has offered a new collection of figures on the deaths in the course of the year, with 33,425 people killed over the course of this single year of a conflict that’s dragged on since 2014.
With so many different factions in Syria the split is a bit complicated, including some 7,494 fighters from ISIS or al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front, 2,923 Syrian troops, 4,435 from pro-government militias, 212 Hezbollah, 1,243 other foreign Shi’ites, and 6,452 people that were either rebels or part of the US-backed Kurdish YPG’s forces.
The biggest single segment though was civilians, with 10,507 Syrian civilians killed, and 2,109 of them children under 18. Here too, there is a split based on who killed them, with the single largest segment, 2,423 civilians, killed by the US-led coalition. 1,884 were killed in Russian strikes, 1,718 in Syrian strikes, and 1,788 were killed by ISIS forces.
The US-led coalition figure is particularly noteworthy, as over the course of the entire war, in both Iraq and Syria, the coalition on Thursday claimed only 817 civilians killed overall by them. Syrian Observatory’s figures were nearly three times this, despite covering only half the war-zone and about a fifth of the war’s duration.
Of course, 33,000+ dead would be a lot of deaths in the course of a war, but it’s important to remember this is not an overall accounting of the Syrian War, let alone the ISIS war in both Iraq and Syria, but merely a single year of what’s been happening for years in Syria.