Syrian conflict death toll put at over 140,000

More than 140,000 people, over 7,000 of them children, have been killed in Syria’s uprising-turned-civil war, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said today.

The pro-opposition observatory said the period since the "Geneva 2" peace talks for Syria began last month had been the bloodiest of the nearly three-year conflict.

The death toll is now at 140,041, according to the group, which is based in Britain but has a network of activists across the country. Among the dead were 7,626 children and 5,064 women.

The revolt against President Bashar al-Assad began as peaceful street protests but transformed into an armed insurgency after a fierce security force crackdown. It has since descended into a civil war with sectarian dimensions.

The observatory’s toll could not be independently verified.

The United Nations said last month it would stop updating its death count in Syria as dangerous conditions on the ground made estimates impossible to update with accuracy.

The observatory said all those cases included in its count were those it could document with either names and identification documents, or pictures and videos. It said the fate of tens of thousands more people remained unknown.

It said it counted more than 30,000 rebels killed and over 50,000 from pro-Assad forces. But the group’s chief, Rami Abdelrahman, said the true toll on both sides was likely much higher - by perhaps more than 60,000.

Groups on both sides try to hide their casualties, he said, making fighter death tolls very difficult to gauge.

“The observatory would like to point out that these statistics do not include the fate of more than 180,000 people missing inside the regime’s prisons,” it said in a statement. “Nor does it include more than 7,000 detained by regime forces and armed groups loyal to it, or the hundreds of people kidnapped (by rebel groups) because they are believed to be regime loyalists.”

It called for an immediate ceasefire for the Geneva peace talks, now planned to go into a third round. “It is shameful that the international community has done nothing to show that it will defend human rights,” Abdelrahman told Reuters by telephone. “They are just looking on at this tragedy. The Syrian people dying are just statistics to them.”

Yesterday, a car bomb exploded outside a mosque in a rebel-held village in southern Syria as worshippers left after Friday prayers, killing dozens, according to anti-government sources.

The explosion in Yadouda burned vehicles parked nearby and damaged the white-domed mosque, according to video images posted by activists fighting to oust President Bashar Assad.

Yadouda is in the southern province of Daraa, the birthplace of the uprising against Assad that began with peaceful protests in March 2011 and morphed into a civil war that has killed more than 130,000 people.

The motive for the blast could not immediately be determined and activists provided varying death tolls ranging from 29 to 43. State-run TV said only three people were killed.

Car bombs have frequently been used by Islamic extremists both against the government and against moderate rivals in the Sunni-led opposition movement. Government forces also have been known to use explosive-packed vehicles and the two sides frequently trade blame in attacks targeting mosques.

An activist in the nearby region of Quneitra, Jamal al-Golani, said the car bomb killed at least 29 people of which 18 were identified. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which uses a wide network of local activists to track violence in the country, said 32 people were killed, including a child and 10 rebels.

Another activist in Daraa, Ahmad al-Masalmeh, who gave a death toll of 43, said the car bomb blew up next to a tanker filled with diesel, causing a large fire and burning “some bodies beyond recognition”.

The mosque is known as Ammar bin Yasser, although some people refer to it as al-Baraa bin Thabet, Mr al-Masalmeh said.

Clinics in the village and nearby areas were full of wounded people and there were calls over loudspeakers for residents to donate blood. Mr al-Masalmeh said some of the wounded were taken across the border to Jordan for treatment. “Hospitals are overwhelmed with the wounded,” he said via Skype.

Videos posted by activists online showed several charred vehicles outside the damaged mosque.

Earlier, the United Nations paused the evacuation of the embattled Syrian city of Homs while the government screened military-age men who had left the area.

The halt in evacuations came just a day after a ceasefire was extended for three more days in Homs. Hundreds more civilians are believed to still be trapped in a rebel-held medieval quarter known as Old Homs.

World Food Programme director in Syria Matthew Hollingworth said several dozen men who left Old Homs during earlier evacuations were being held in a school elsewhere in the city and questioned by Syrian authorities. UN officials were present at the school, he said.

“The agreement has been we will now concentrate on the process of completing the regularisation of status of the men from 15 to 55,” Mr Hollingworth said. “Only when that’s done, will we look at another evacuation.”

Later in the day, however, he said the UN was not linking the next evacuation to the men’s release.

The Syrian government considers men of military age to be potential combatants who must obtain security clearance before being released. Those suspected by authorities of being rebels will probably be detained.

The men being held in the school were among 1,400 people evacuated by the UN and the Syrian Red Crescent from opposition-held areas of Homs over the past week as a fragile truce took hold between forces loyal to Assad and armed rebels.

In all, more than 400 men from Homs have surrendered to Syrian forces and around 200 have been released, according to an Associated Press tally.

Meanwhile, Syrian troops and rebels clashed around the rugged hills surrounding the town of Yabroud - the last rebel stronghold in Syria’s mountainous Qalamoun region. Syrian aircraft fired shells towards farmland close to the town and clashes broke out in the nearby town of al-Sahel, said local activist Nader al-Husseini.

Backed by Lebanon’s Hizbullah fighters, the Syrian army has been on a crushing offensive in the region since early December, trying to sever a main thoroughfare for rebels from Lebanon. At least 500 families fled the area, crossing into the neighbouring Lebanese town of Arsal, said UN official Dana Sleiman.

At UN headquarters in New York, Security Council experts have met to start what are expected to be difficult negotiations on a resolution demanding immediate humanitarian access to all areas of Syria.

Reuters