2014 deadliest year so far in Syrian civil war

Over 76,000 killed, including 3,500 children, monitors claim

 

More than 76,000 people died in Syria’s civil war in 2014, including more than 3,500 children, a monitoring group reported Thursday. The figures would make last year the deadliest in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011.

The figures from the monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, put the total number of dead in the conflict as of Wednesday at 206,603.

Not confirmed by U.N.

The group, based in Britain, uses a network of contacts inside Syria to tally casualties, and its figures cannot be independently corroborated. The United Nations, which once regularly documented the numbers of dead and wounded in Syria, discontinued the practice some time ago.

But the United Nations said in December that more than 200,000 people had been killed in the conflict, which began as an uprising against President Bashar Assad and has since evolved into a civil war that has destabilized the Middle East.

The Syrian Observatory’s 2014 casualty figures, as reported by Agence France-Presse, include 17,790 civilians, among them 3,501 children.

 

The rest include Syrian soldiers and allied militia members, rebel fighters and members of jihadist militant organizations that have joined the fighting.

The Syrian Observatory’s total of 76,021 for 2014 compared with its total of 73,447 in 2013, 49,294 in 2012 and 7,841 in 2011.

The number of wounded in the Syria conflict has been even more difficult to determine, partly because of restricted access to combat zones and the collapse of the country’s public health system.

1 million wounded

Last month, the World Health Organization’s Syria representative, Elizabeth Hoff, said the cumulative number of wounded was approximately 1 million.

Hoff made the estimate as part of a U.N. annual appeal for funding at a donors conference in Berlin. The organization said it was seeking $8.4 billion in 2015 to help nearly 18 million victims of Syria’s conflict, mostly displaced civilians and refugees.

 

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