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Friday 14 June 2013

Syria monthly death toll at 5,000, says UN

"Sorry, we do not accept natural death cases" (freesyria.tumblr.com)

As at 30 April 2013, at least 93,000 people have been killed in Syria since the start of the conflict, according to new United Nations figures.
This represents a rise of more than 30,000 since the UN last issued numbers covering the period to November 2012.
“The constant flow of killings continues at shockingly high levels -- with more than 5,000 killings documented every month since last July,” from around 1,000 per month in the summer of 2011, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay announced Thursday.
“Unfortunately, as the study indicates, this is most likely a minimum casualty figure. The true number of those killed is potentially much higher,” she said
“This extremely high rate of killings, month after month, reflects the drastically deteriorating pattern of the conflict over the past year,” Pillay said.
Some 82.6 percent of the victims documented so far are male, while 7.6 percent are female. The gender of the victim is not indicated in 9.8 percent of cases.
Nevertheless, “the killings of at least 6,561 minors, including at least 1,729 children under ten years old, have been documented,” the High Commissioner said.
“There are also well-documented cases of individual children being tortured and executed, and entire families, including babies, being massacred – which, along with this devastatingly high death toll, is a terrible reminder of just how vicious this conflict has become.”
While the study stresses the accuracy of geographical patterns may be affected by variable reporting by the different data sources, it shows that the greatest number of documented killings has been recorded in the governorates of:
  • Rif Dimashq (17,800)
  • Homs (16,400)
  • Aleppo (11,900)
  • Idlib (10,300)
  • Deraa (8,600)
  • Hama (8,100)
  • Damascus (6,400) and
  • Deir Ezzor (5,700)

OHCHR called for an immediate ceasefire "before tens of thousands more people are killed or injured.”