Aisha Shahada and her husband come to the wall every day, sometimes on their way to or from the shops, sometimes with the sole purpose of seeing their dead son's face. There it is, on a poster, against the red, white and black colours of Syria's national flag, and stuck up alongside images of several hundred other soldiers who have given their lives for the government side in more than two years of civil war.

They call it the Martyrs' Wall, and the row of posters stretches a hundred yards at one of the main crossroads in this coastal city. Nowhere else in Syria is the cost of the war to President Bashar al-Assad's forces displayed so graphically.

Ahmed Mustafa Karim, Aisha's son, was 21 when he was killed in his home town of Aleppo on 14 October last year. His parents had fled the city several months earlier when rebel forces stormed in. "He had been in the army for a year and a quarter when he died. We never saw him after he was conscripted. He went off saying 'You will not see my face again unless we win or I die,'" says Aisha.

His poster is on the third of six rows of pictures, just low enough for his mother to go up on tiptoes and kiss his face. There are at least 60 in each row, bringing the total to around 400. In the corner of Ahmed's picture hovers a tough-looking Assad in dark glasses and wearing army fatigues. The motif of their commander-in-chief is repeated on almost every poster.

"We pray for Bashar. He's better than all other Arab League leaders put together," says Aisha, who is confident that Syria's war would end if only Qatar and Turkey stopped allowing the rebels a safe haven as well as supplying arms and foreign fighters across the border. "I pray those two countries one day go through the same kind of war. Then they will realise what we are going through."

The 400 faces on the Martyrs' Wall represent only a fraction of the human losses that the Syrian government has suffered. But they highlight one of the least-known facts in the Syrian conflict. Western politicians, UN officials and Syrian rebel fighting groups regularly mention the war's death toll as reaching 100,000 or more. Coupled with the grim reality of indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas by government artillery, the impression tends to be left that most of the 100,000 dead were defenceless civilians, slaughtered by Assad's forces. It is only when the figure is broken into categories that a more startling truth emerges: fewer civilians have died than have government forces.

The most reliable source for Syria's death toll is the UK-based and independent Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of local reporters, activists and doctors, and tends to favour the opposition. It concentrates on fatalities where there is more than one source, and preferably when the names of the dead are known. It recently reported that between the start of the crisis in March 2011 and 31 August this year 110,371 people had died. Around 40,146 civilians were killed, including nearly 4,000 women and more than 5,800 children. The toll of government forces totals more than 45,000, made up of 27,654 army soldiers, 17,824 pro-regime militia and 171 members of the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, which has sent fighters into battle alongside Syrian forces. The observatory counted a further 2,726 unidentified people killed in the conflict. It says the rebels have lost less than half the government toll, a total of 21,850 fighters.

The high government death toll may come as a surprise since the Syrian army makes few infantry attacks on rebel positions, preferring to concentrate on artillery strikes and bombing. But the government troops man hundreds of isolated checkpoints. They are a relatively easy target for night-time ambushes, as in the recent battle which prompted a major clash in the largely Christian village of Maaloula. Others die on their way to work.

Mona Ibrahim runs the Office for Martyrs' Affairs in the Tartous governor's building. "My husband was a general. In army uniform he was driving with four colleagues to his job in Baba Amr in Homs in August 2011 when it was attacked by gunmen. He and two others died. The other two were seriously wounded," she explains.

The Office for Martyrs' Affairs was set up a year ago, providing money to parents and widows of dead soldiers. A new branch, just established, provides extra help, including counselling, to mothers with children who have lost their father. Mona Ibrahim was one of the first war widows on the government side and says she felt a duty to help others. "I knew what pain my own children feel," she says.