Some 3,300 people have been killed in fighting between rebels seeking President Bashar al-Assad's ouster and their erstwhile jihadist allies since clashes erupted in January, a monitoring group said today.
"Some 3,300 people have been killed ever since the start of fighting on January 3 between the (jihadist) Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on one side, and (rebel) Islamist and other groups on the other," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The deaths came "in car and (other) bomb attacks, suicide blasts and fighting," said the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on activists and other sources inside Syria.
While rebels initially welcomed ISIL in their battle to overthrow Assad, many of them later turned against the group, accusing it of hijacking the rebellion and carrying out a string of kidnappings and killings of activists and rival rebels.
Among the overall fatalities were at least 281 civilians, the majority of them killed by shelling and stray bullets, the Observatory said.
But 21 of them were executed in a children's hospital-turned-ISIL prison in the northern city of Aleppo, it said.
And it said the jihadists executed a family of seven Kurds, beheading some of them, at a prison in the Aleppo countryside.
Most of the dead were fighters from both sides.
The Observatory has documented the deaths of 924 ISIL members and 1,380 rebels, including Islamists.
It also said more than 700 other fighters from both sides had died in battle but could not be identified, while 29 bodies were found in ISIL bases, most likely executed by the jihadists expulsion before their expulsion.
