(Damascus) The war in Syria has left more than 528,500 dead, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) said on Wednesday, after nearly 14 years of a devastating conflict triggered by the repression of an uprising. pro-democracy by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, overthrown on December 8.
Posted yesterday at 10:44 a.m.
More than 181,939 civilians are among the more than 528,592 people killed since the start of the war in 2011, including at least 15,207 women and 25,284 children, as well as combatants, according to the Observatory.
This toll includes the deaths of the year 2024, but also thousands of other deaths during the years of war that the NGO was only able to verify recently.
In total for the year 2024, marked in December by the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s power, the OSDH reports the death of 6,777 people. Among them are 3,598 civilians, including 240 women and 337 “children under 18 years of age”, according to the report published by the NGO, based in the United Kingdom, but with a vast network of sources in Syria.
Furthermore, 3,179 fighters from the ranks of the different belligerents were killed, including the forces of the “old regime”, “Islamist armed groups” and jihadists, according to the same source.
In 2023, the OSDH reported 4,360 people killed, including nearly 1,900 civilians.
Starting on March 15, 2011 with a violently repressed popular uprising, the conflict became more complex with the intervention of international actors and the influx of jihadists from around the world, into a territory fragmented by the war.
The entry into Damascus on December 8 of a rebel coalition led by the radical Sunni Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) sounded the death knell for the “regime”. For more than half a century, the Assad family reigned supreme over Syria, repressing all opposition and muzzling public freedoms.
The OSDH, since 2011, has been able to categorically verify the deaths of more than 64,000 people in the jails of the former power “because of torture, medical neglect or poor conditions” of detention.
