Geneva: The UN has presented a report to the ongoing 48th session of the Human Rights Council, according to which 350,209 identified individuals were killed in the conflict in Syria between March 2011 to March 2021.
Michelle Bachelet, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the Council on Friday that this assessment was based on her office’s own data, records maintained by civil society organisations and information from the Syrian government, reports Xinhua news agency.
She explained that the numbers include only those people identifiable by their full names, with an established date of death and who had died in an identified governorate.
“Any information that did not include these three elements had been excluded, and an exhaustive review had been carried out to prevent duplicate records,” she said.
According to Bachelet, more than one in 13 of those who died due to conflict, was a woman, 26,727 in all and almost one in 13 was a child a grim total of 27,126 young lives lost.
The Governorate of Aleppo saw the greatest number of documented killings, with 51,731 named individuals.
Other heavy death tolls were recorded in Rural Damascus, 47,483; Homs, 40,986; Idlib, 33,271; Hama, 31,993; and Tartus, 31,369.
Bachelet stressed that the killings may have had even more victims, but that has yet to be fully documented.
The armed conflict in Syria broke out in 2011 and quickly turned into a full-fledged war.
Over the past years, the delegations of the Syrian government and the opposition have held several rounds of peace talks in Geneva, but are yet to find a solution.
