At Least 200,000 Dead in Assad's Syrian War
According to the United Nations, as of April 2014, more than 191,000 people have died in the three years of the Syrian civil war. However, since this figure comes from a report that doesn't include the past five months of fighting, the true number of the dead is expected to be higher. The Wall Street Journal explains:
The rights organization said the actual death toll is likely to be higher because the report only includes deaths in which the identity of the victims and other details of the killing are properly documented, the U.N. said.
Some of the more startling facts to come out of the report involve the demographics. The U.N.-reported death toll estimates that roughly 85 percent of those killed in the Syrian civil war are male.
The U.N. said 85.1% of the killings involved male victims, while 9.3% were female. The sex of the victim wasn't identified in a little more than 5% of cases.
The U.N. said the conflict-torn country has taken a toll on young people with 2,165 recorded deaths of children under nine years-old and 6,638 victims aged 10 years to 18 years."
Precise numbers remain hard to come by. Earlier this week, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll near 180,000. According to the group, nearly one-third of those killed were said to be civilians.
Nevertheless, the scope of the carnage remains difficult to fathom. Consider that last June, the United Nations released a similar report saying that 92,000 people had died in Syria as of April of last year. In other words, 99,000 people died between April 2013 and April 2014. That's over 270 per day.
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With no solution in sight as well as the emergence of ISIL fighters in the fray, that number will only continue to rise.
This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/08/at-least-200000-dead-in-assads-syrian-war/378975/
