The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has reported on Friday that they have a new estimated on the overall death toll of the Syrian War since March 2011, saying they’ve documented 343,511 deaths, with over 100,000 civilians among the killed.
The split on the figures shows that pro-government forces are taking the biggest brunt among combatants, with 119,000 pro-government fighters killed, including Syrian troops, militia members, and Hezbollah fighters.
On the rebel side, about 59,000 “rebels” were reported killed, along with 62,200 Islamists. Though the difference between he two isn’t always clear, generally speaking Islamists includes ISIS and al-Qaeda, while rebels includes everyone else.
This new set of figures comes ahead of a new round of peace talks, and underscores just how much is at stake. Though it’s impossible to have totally accurate figures in the chaos of Syria, the Observatory figures show general trends, including a trend that the Islamists have been dying at a higher rate than they have in the past, likely a function of mounting ISIS losses.
Yup, the majority of the civilians were slain by ISIS/DAESH and friends and the majority of the rest are dead terrorists.
Too many male civilians – women = 12,000; men = 72,000. When reporting from government-controlled areas ratio is ~1 woman for every two men while from opposition-controlled areas ratio is ~1 woman for every eight men. Either men in opposition-controlled areas are far less lucky than women in such areas or militant deaths are being reported as civilian deaths. This was a known problem with SOHR in early days when they reported as civilians militants who’d not deserted from SAA and who were not foreigners. Just like the rest of their reporting, the “activists” in opposition-controlled areas are most likely inflating male civilian deaths for propaganda reasons – don’t forget with East Aleppo we were told there were 275,000 – 300,000 civilians but when liberated it turned out there were about 30,000 militants, “activists” and camp followers who asked to be evacuated (not ethnically cleansed as some media sources claim) to Idlib and about 73,000 civilians who elected to stay behind in the liberated areas. So I suspect the true number of civilian deaths in Syria is closer to 55,000 (~24,000 male, ~12, 000 female and ~19,000 children). than 103,000.
BTW, even if the SOHR figures are right, the SOHR and the Daily Mail must be applauded for publishing them as they very clearly show that the meme in western media that Assad has murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrian really is fake news, and any media that continues to report such claims is little better than Der Stürmer on this subject.
Even that sounds like an over estimate. Why would more male civilians die than female civilians? The Syrian government might also be overstating male civilian deaths by misstating off-duty soldiers as civilians. We’re talking about mostly deaths from explosions, be they artillery shells or bombs dropped from aeroplanes. There is no reason to believe that these were killing more men than women, especially in rebel held areas where they are zero military age men not press ganged to join rebel militias. There should really be more female civilian deaths than male civilian deaths in rebel held areas because there are more female civilians.
Perhaps because men generally spend more time out of the house as they are more likely to do public service jobs, etc. This is not a Muslim thing – how often do you see women driving buses, digging holes in the road, undertaking construction work , etc. in the west? So, I can understand 2 to 1 ratio but 8 to 1 seems high.
I don’t trust the SOHR but western MSM does. This is well short of the 500,000 figure that has been thrown around for almost two years, so what is the source of that mythical figure?
“what difference does it make?” – Hillary Clinton