Rights Group: Assad Regime Responsible for 89 Percent of Civilian Casualties Since March 2011

ARK News: A rights group said that the Assad regime is responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths in Syria, indicating that Assad's forces have killed civilians many times more than those who were killed by the ISIS and Al-Qaeda extremist groups.

In a new report on civilian casualties in Syria, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that it compiled a list of up to 222,114 civilians who have been killed in Syria since March 2011. Of those, more than 89 percent were killed by the Assad regime. Other estimates put the figure at well above half a million as the media blackout surrounding the Assad regime’s military operations means that there were thousands of unreported civilian casualties.

According to the report, Assad's forces killed at least 198,152 civilians, including 22,363 children, while Russian forces killed 6,239 civilians, including 1,804 children.

The monitoring group also said that the Hay’ at Tahrir al-Sham and ISIS extremist groups killed around 5,312 civilians, including 887 children. It noted that 4,112 civilians, including 974 children, were killed in attacks that the Network said were untraceable.

The SNHR went on to say that the international anti-ISIS coalition forces killed 2,830 civilians, including 859 children, while the PYD militias were responsible for the death of 1,008 civilians, including 159 children. It added that 4,461 civilians, including 943 children, were killed in a variety of other ways, including explosions, gunfire by unidentified gunmen, and drowning.

The Syrian Coalition said that those figures provided yet further evidence of the war crimes the Assad regime is committing against Syrian civilians. It called on the international community to hold those responsible for war crimes to account by referring Syria to the International Criminal Court.

Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department

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