UN: Victims of Syrian conflict top 60 thousand
Geneva (AsiaNews / Agencies) - More than 60 thousand people have been killed in Syria since March 2011 - which initially began as part of the Arab spring - until the civil war of today. The figures have been provided by the UN Human Rights Commission, which released a study carried out by the Benetech research center that shows that up until November 2012, there were 59,648 deaths in Syria.
Navi Pillay, the UN High
Commissioner says that by now that figure has been exceeded by far. In
recent days, the Syrian opposition had declared that the dead were 45 thousand.
The
Benetech center has checked the lists of victims available from seven different
sources, the opposition and the government, and kept count only of those with
full names, date and place of the death. Precisely
for this reason the authors warn that the figure of 59,648 is minimal, since
there are many dead and many killings not reported by sources or missing some
data.
The study fails to indicate
whether the victims are soldiers or civilians, but it shows that 76.1% of those
killed were male, and the 7.5 are women. The
graphs on different sites, show that the most affected areas are the suburbs of
Damascus and the province of Homs.
Pillay
stressed several times that the deaths were caused by both sides in the
conflict, government soldiers and armed opposition groups.
This
statement is very important because the information that arrives in the West is
often anti-Assad and especially stresses the violent actions of the regular
army. But
there are also the violence of the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic
fundamentalist groups fighting against the regime.
In recent days, Sister
Agnes-Mariam de la Croix, Superior of a Syrian Carmelite monastery, who had to
seek refuge in Lebanon, broke the news of a Christian of 38 years, Andrei
Arbashe, whose decapitated body was found along a street, prey to stray dogs. The
nun says that man was executed only because his brother has expressed negative
opinions about the rebels, accusing them of being bandits.
Sister
Agnes Mariam accuses the West of supporting the rebels despite growing evidence
of their gratuitous violence. "The
democratic and free world is supporting the Islamists," she says.
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