1521 Civilians Killed in August 2016

Including 1082 at the Hands of the Syrian and Russian Regime

SNHR has published its periodic death toll report for the month of August 2016 in which it documented the killing of1521 civilians at the hands of the main influential parties in Syria.

The report notes that SNHR team encounters difficulties in documenting victims from armed opposition factions as many of those victims are killed on battlefronts and not inside cities. Also, we aren’t able to obtain details such as names, pictures and other important details on account of the armed opposition forces’ unwillingness to reveal such information for security concerns among other reasons. Therefore, the actual number of victims is much greater than what is being recorded.

On the other side, the report affirms that it is almost impossible to access information about victims from government forces or from ISIS and the margin of error is considerably higher due to the lack of any applicable methodology in this type of documentation. The Syrian government and ISIS don’t publish, reveal, or record their victims. From our perspective, the statistics published by some groups on this category of victims are fictitious and are not based on any actual data. Therefore, the report only incudes civilian victims who were killed by all parties and compare them.

The report breaks down the death toll of August 2016 where government forces killed 898 civilians including 247 children (Eight children are killed every day) and 193 women. Out of the total number of civilian victim, 49% were children and women which is an explicit indicator on the deliberate targeting of civilians by the government forces. The report notes that alleged Russian forces killed 184 civilians including 49 children and 29 women.

Additionally, the report documented the killing of 30 civilians including three children and eight women at the hand of the Self-management forces (Primarily consisting of the Democratic Union Party forces – branch for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party)