January 28, 2012 The Syrian Death Numbers Are All Made Up Headlines the Pakistani paper The Nation: Syrian forces killed 7,384 children: report. The headline is very wrong.

bigger From the piece: Syrian forces have killed at least 7,384 children since March last year in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to a report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). Rima Salah, acting Unicef deputy executive director said as of January 7, 384 children, most were boys, had been killed. She said about 380 children, some less than 14 years old, had been detained. Assad forces in brutal crackdown against innocent people and pro-democracy workers have killed thousands of people, including women and children, since March 2011. It seems that some folks at The Nation somehow made up the number killed by adding the "as of January 7" date times thousand and the number 384 the UN got from somewhere. Then they put that into the headline and the opening graph thus reporting a fantasy number some of their readers may well believe. Lets take a look at the MSNBC version of the story about those children in Syria which at least got the number right which the UNICEF's Rima Salah used: At least 384 children have been killed and virtually the same number have been jailed, the United Nations Children's Fund said. UNICEF spokeswoman Marixie Mercado told Reuters the figures were based on reports by human rights organizations which it judged to be credible. What are "children" in this context? Which "credible" human right organization did the UNICEF spokeswomen talk about? The UN's own human right official Navi Pillay who back in December just made up the number of people killed? Or does Rima Saleh trust that shady Syrian Observatory for Human Rights organization in London of which actually two feuding ones exist: The moving force behind the rival group (www.syriahr.org) who issued a letter attacking Abdulrahman’s group (www.syriahr.com) is a London-based Syrian exile and medical doctor named Mousab Azzawi.

...

While both Abdulrahman and Azzawi stress their work is not influenced by political allegiances, their respective political positions correlate with a greater dispute between Syria's opposition groups on the question of foreign intervention and the military option. The campaign led by Azzawi to discredit Abdulrahman seems to come on the heels of a major fallout between the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syria (NCB). Which of the two sides did UNICEF judge to be credible? The one that has neocons write their policy papers? Or the other one which takes fake videos as proof: Kako [of Abdulrahman's organization] also said that a single person with a video proving the claim would be accepted: “we don’t put it out [from a single source] unless he got maybe a video of it, for example, because a video cannot be denied if it is shown that it is a genuine video.” When asked about the process for verifying the authenticity of such videos, and the circumstances in which victims were killed, Kako said: “When we get the video from our activists, we don’t take anything from any other sources.” So who of these two provided UNICEF with that very exact number of 7,384 children killed when at the same time even the UN's human right boss Navi Pillay finally found some sense and stopped the false counting and making up of nonsense numbers: On Wednesday, the UN said it had stopped compiling a death toll for Syria because it is too difficult to get information. "Some areas are totally closed, such as parts of Homs, so we are unable to update that figure. But in my view 5,000 and more is a huge figure and should really shock the international community into taking action," AFP reported Pillay as telling reporters. As the above quoted must-read Al-Akhbar report closes: The lack of transparency regarding sources of casualty reports may have its roots in the difficult conditions activists are working under inside Syria. But short of a serious push to protect these sources and to insist on accountability by all sides, propaganda will continue to prevail over reality. Adding sloppy news editors like at The Nation to that and one can only disregarded any number of Syrian death quoted in any news or UN report as certain to be a false one. My best guess is that the numbers on both sides, the government forces and the rebel forces, are both in the low thousands and about the same. Posted by b on January 28, 2012 at 19:09 UTC | Permalink Comments