Death Toll



It’s difficult to arrive at exact numbers of dead and wounded given the chaos in Syria; the deliberate secrecy from many warring parties, including the government; and the dangers that prevent monitoring groups from physically reaching many parts of the country. This is not uncommon in wars; death toll estimates from World War II still vary. Personally, I find the upper range of estimates for the Syrian conflict, nearing half a million dead, quite plausible.

The United Nations stopped officially counting deaths at just over 100,000, in July 2013, saying that it could no longer independently verify them and thus could not present its figures as reliable. But the violence has only escalated since then, with more government airstrikes and use of heavy weaponry, continuing battles between the government and myriad insurgent groups, and the emergence of the Islamic State.

A report from the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in August 2014 put the number of documentable deaths at more than 191,000, with caveats that many other reported deaths were excluded because they could not be verified to the same degree. A year later, United Nations agencies were using an estimate of 250,000.

But other groups put the numbers much higher. The Syrian Center for Policy Research — which until recently worked in Damascus, the Syrian capital, meaning it was tolerated by the government — put the number of dead at 470,000 as of December 2015. That figure is close to what the United Nations’ envoy, Staffan de Mistura, said he estimated (400,000) based on his own personal analysis.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which uses a network of sources inside the country, says it has documented more than 270,000 deaths as of February — meaning it has names, dates and other details for each one — but estimates the total to be 370,000. The Violations Documentation Center, one of the more rigorous of the nongovernmental bodies working inside Syria, has documented more than 131,000 deaths on the anti-government side alone, not counting those fighting on the side of the government or for the Islamic State.

