More than 371,000 Syrians have been killed since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, a United Kingdom-based war monitor reported on Friday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) was able to document the 371,222 Syrian war dead, saying that the overall death toll may exceed 570,000 dead given the large numbers of foreign fighters involved in the conflict as well as 88,000 prisoners who were tortured to death in detention centres set up by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Of the officially recorded 371,222 dead, around 112,623 were civilians, 21,065 were minors and 13,173 were women, the monitor was cited as saying by Efe news.
The observatory said that 65,187 soldiers died to date fighting on behalf of the Assad regime, out of which an estimated total of 50,484 were of Syrian decent.
An estimated 65,726 non-Syrians died in the fighting. They were mainly from the Arab World but also included Afghans and Iranians belonging to radical armed groups, such as the Islamic State terror organization and the Levant Front, a Syrian rebel group.
The observatory's appraisals did not include the estimated 4,500 kidnapped individuals taken by IS or the estimated 4,700 hostages taken from Assad regime and affiliated forces.
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Syria's civil war erupted in 2011 after the government clamped down on popular protests sweeping the region. It claimed the lives of roughly half a million people, according to the Syrian Centre for Policy and Research.
At its height, the IS caliphate stretched across northern and central Iraq and Syria, swallowing up the ancient and densely populated cities of Mosul and Raqqa.
IS is on the brink of territorial defeat and only the hardiest fighters remained in Baghuz, an unremarkable Syrian town on the banks of the Euphrates near the Iraqi border and the so-called caliphate's final outpost in the southeast of the country.
On March 4, more than 200 from the terror organization yielded to international troops who had laid siege to Baghuz, where a final and major offensive was underway.
--IANS
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