The war in Syria has left almost half a million people dead

Syria has been dragging a civil war for more than 10 years, a conflict that despite not presenting the rawness of years ago is still latent and has not yet ended. The Syrian population is still dying, not so much from bombs, but from hunger and the devastation caused by this endless war. The Arab country accumulates chilling figures. According to Action Against Hunger, 13.4 million people are in need of humanitarian aid, 9.3 million Syrians are food insecure and 2.2 million more are at imminent risk of food insecurity.

Despite being one of the great humanitarian catastrophes, along with Yemen, the Syrian conflict remains forgotten except for a few notable dates or events of notable importance. The clearest example of this was when the war in Syria entered its tenth year, with the front pages of all the media being covered with news about the Arab country, recalling the decade of a conflict that is still going on. Another key event was the Syrian elections, which once again brought Syria back into the public eye. Once the results were known, the Arab country fell back into oblivion.

The situation in Syria remains catastrophic, the wounds of an open war have not been closed. The war in Syria has revealed the brutality of "all against all", with indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population, torture, kidnapping, encircling cities to the point of starving the population, making it impossible for humanitarian aid to enter, and all those who have committed these crimes against humanity continue to go unpunished. That is why Syria will not be able to heal its wounds until the international community faces up to its role and pays and makes people pay for ten years of suffering.

In an attempt to keep the international community aware of what this conflict has entailed and continues to entail, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) has drawn up a new death toll for the war. The organisation raises the number of people who have died as a result of this conflict to almost 500,000, a figure that includes around 100,000 more fatalities than the one published in March this year.

The London-based Syrian Observatory stressed that it was able to document 105,015 more fatalities, including 24,103 civilians, including 2,748 children and 1,249 women, which the Syrian Observatory had already mentioned but was unable to document before 2021. The report also includes fighters from rebel and Islamic factions, government army deserters who died under torture in regime prisons, regime soldiers and government-backed Syrian militiamen.

Finally, and as a result of this new balance sheet, the number of deaths documented by the OSHD after more than 10 years of conflict amounts to 494,438 people, including nearly 160,000 civilians. The organisation also states that the army and pro-government militias have killed 130,254 civilians, including 19,691 children, in ground operations, bombings and torture in detention centres.

"The overwhelming majority of these deaths occurred between late 2012 and November 2015," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP news agency, referring to the latest additions. The Observatory has also documented a total of at least 57,567 deaths in government prisons and detention centres since 2011, up from the 16,000 confirmed deaths it reported in March.

Today, fighting on the ground has been reduced to a virtual minimum. Indeed, a deal brokered by Turkey and Russia in March 2020 froze a government offensive on the rebel-held enclave of Idlib that would have resulted in the loss of many more lives, especially civilians. Bashar al-Assad's government controls more than two-thirds of the country and succeeded in legitimising a fourth seven-year term in office in the last elections, with 95.1% of the vote.