Death toll in Syria’s war tops 160,000 — activists

BEIRUT — The death toll in Syria’s three-year conflict has climbed past 160,000, an activist group said Monday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday it has documented 162,402 deaths in the conflict, including civilians, rebels and members of the Syrian military. 

That figure also contains militiamen, such as members the Lebanese Hizbollah group who has been fighting alongside Assad’s forces, as well as foreign fighters among the opposition forces.

The observatory remains the sole organisation providing a reliable tally of Syria’s war dead.

The grim tally, however, only presents one facet of the effect of the crackdown on a revolt against President Bashar Assad that erupted in March 2011. The crisis has also uprooted some 6.5 million people from their homes, forced 2.7 million to flee the country, laid waste to cities and towns alike, and unleashed sectarian hatreds that have rippled across the region.

The government has presented Syria’s June 3 presidential election, which Assad is widely expected to win, as a means to end the conflict. The Syrian opposition and its Western allies have denounced the vote as a farce aimed solely at lending Assad a veneer of electoral legitimacy.

It also remains unclear how the government can hold a credible vote when the nation is engulfed in fighting and a significant chunk of the country is in opposition hands.

The United Nations has stopped updating its own tally of the Syrian dead, saying it can no longer verify the sources of information. The world body’s last count in late July was 100,000 killed.

The observatory bases its figures on information it obtains from a network of activists inside Syria. Its numbers are based on the names of those killed, collected by activists who document the dead in hospitals, morgues and identify them from video materials.

Civilians comprised about a third, or 53,978, of the observatory’s new toll. Those deaths include 8,607 children and 5,586 women.

The uprising also has killed 26,858 rebel fighters and 37,685 Syrian soldiers, the observatory said. It said 25,147 pro-government fighters also have died on the battlefield, including 438 Hizbollah fighters, and 1,224 foreign Shiite militants and Palestinian fighters.

The Syrian government does not publicise the number of its casualties.

The observatory counted 13,529 deaths among foreigners and other fighters who have sided with the rebels, including members of an Al Qaeda-linked group and other hard-line Islamist groups. 

There are also 2,891 unidentified bodies in the conflict, and 2,314 identified bodies of Syrian army troops who have crossed over to the opposition side to fight the government.

The observatory considers its tally a rough estimate and said the overall figure of those killed was higher than the sum of subcategories.

On the opposition side, Islamist extremists, including foreign fighters and Syrian rebels who have taken up hard-line Al Qaeda-style ideologies, have played an increasingly prominent role in the armed opposition, dampening the West’s support for the rebellion.

Syria’s uprising began with largely peaceful protests against Assad’s rule before slowly turning into a civil war. The conflict has taken on sectarian overtones, with predominantly Sunni Muslim rebels battling an Assad government that is dominated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Bickering among the opposition’s exiled politicians who make up the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition has hampered efforts to create a credible alternative to Assad.

On Monday, a spokesperson for the opposition’s Turkey-based interim government said its defence minister, Asaad Mustafa, had submitted his resignation. The spokesperson, Sarah Karkour, did not say why Mustafa was stepping down.

An opposition official told AP by telephone that Mustafa had differences and disagreements with others in the government, including interim Prime Minister Ahmad Toumeh.

Mustafa’s resignation only goes into effect with the approval of the coalition’s president, Ahmad Al Jarba, the official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media on the issue.