Some 11.5 percent of Syria’s population have been killed or injured since the country’s civil war began in March 2011, The Guardian said Thursday citing data from a new report from the Syrian Centre for Policy Research (SCPR).
Findings from the SCPR suggest that the number of fatalities caused by war, directly and indirectly, stands at approximately 470,000—nearly double the figure of 250,000 used by the United Nations, until it stopped collating statistics in 2014. The body said the lack of access and reliability of statistics were the main reasons why they stopped counting Syria’s dead.
Of the 470,000 dead the report estimates that 400,000 were directly due to violence, while the remaining 70,000 died after failing to receive adequate health services, such as medicine, especially for chronic diseases, as well as lack of food, clean water, sanitation and proper housing.
“We use very rigorous research methods and we are sure of this figure,” Rabie Nasser, the report’s author, told The Guardian. “Indirect deaths will be greater in the future, though most NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and the U.N. ignore them.”
“We think that the U.N. documentation and informal estimation underestimated the casualties due to lack of access to information during the crisis,” he continued.
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The number of wounded stands at a staggering 1.9 million while life expectancy dropped from 70 in 2010 to 55.4 in 2015, representing a dramatic fall.
The report also said that Syria’s national wealth, infrastructure and institutions have been “almost obliterated” by the “catastrophic impact” of the relentless fighting between government forces and rebel factions across the Arab state. About 13.8 million Syrians have lost their source of livelihood.
Escalating violence in the past week has caused tens of thousands of Syrians to flee the area with at least 20,000 stuck at the country’s northwest border with Turkey after being denied entry by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.
General Bashar al-Assad’s military, along with allied troops from Lebanon and Iran, fully encircled the countryside north of Aleppo last week, cutting off the main supply route linking the city to Turkey in an attempt to drive out the rebels.
The International Red Cross said on Wednesday that the 50,000 people who had fled the upsurge in fighting in the north require urgent deliveries of food, water and medicine.
Internally displaced people wait at the town of Khirbet Al-Joz to get permission to cross into Turkey, near the Syria-Turkey border, in the Latakia countryside, Syria, Feb. 7, 2016.| Photo: Reuters
Fighting shows no signs of abating after U.N.-sponsored peace talks between rebel factions and government representatives broke down early this month.
The SCPR think tank, which was based in Damascus until recently, conducts its research on the ground across the country. Its report attempts to be neutral and refers to factions trying to overthrow the government, apart from the Islamic State group, as “armed groups.”
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