Beirut: A decade of war in Syria has left nearly half a million people dead, a war monitor said Tuesday, in a new toll that includes 100,000 recently confirmed deaths.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the conflict has claimed 494,438 lives since it erupted in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
The previous tally, issued by the Observatory in March this year, stood at more than 388,000 dead.
The war monitor has since confirmed an additional 105,015 deaths following months of documentation efforts supported by its network of sources on the ground.
“The overwhelming majority of these deaths occurred between the end of 2012 and November 2015,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP, referring to the latest additions.
Of the recently confirmed fatalities, more than 42,000 are civilians, most of them killed under torture in Syrian regime prisons, according to the monitor.
Abdel Rahman said that a lull in the fighting allowed his organisation to investigate reports of deaths that had not been included in the overall tally for lack of documentation.
“It provided us with a window to document tens of thousands of cases for which we lacked evidence,” he said.
With government forces having reconquered large swathes of Syria and a ceasefire still holding along the main front line in Idlib region in the northwest, violence levels are at their lowest since the start of the conflict. AFP
