Syria Death Toll at 93,000
The United Nations has documented 92,901 dead in Syria's civil war.
The United Nations has documented 92,901 dead in Syria’s civil war.
CNN (“U.N.: Documented killings in Syria rise to over 92,000“):
The overall documented death toll in devastated Syria has reached 92,901, the United Nations said Thursday.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay announced the figure, saying it was a result of an updated analysis carried out by specialists and covers the period between March 2011 and the end of April 2013.
“Unfortunately, as the study indicates, this is most likely a minimum casualty figure,” he said. “The true number of those killed is potentially much higher.”
The analysis shows a dramatic increase in the average monthly number of documented killings since the beginning of the conflict, from around 1,000 per month in the summer of 2011 to an average of more than 5,000 per month since July 2012, according to the U.N. report.
“This extremely high rate of killings, month after month, reflects the drastically deteriorating pattern of the conflict over the past year,” Pillay said.
Nearly 83% of the documented victims are male, while about 8% are female. The genders of the others were not indicated.
“Not indicated” is presumably code for “unable to be determined.”
While I oppose American military intervention in this crisis, we can certainly recognize it as catastrophic. Not every horrible thing going on the world, alas, is solvable by the United States military.
I think the U.S. is very much suffering from a case of when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail-itis.
We have a vast, overwhelmingly powerful military and so we tend to think all the world’s problems have a military solution.
Let’s face it, there is an ethnic angle here. If Syrians were blond haired, blue eyed Christians instead of being brown skinned Arab Muslims, we most likely would have seen intervention by now, regardless of talk of the helplessness of the US military.
As it is, I think that if we intervene, it will be to stop what would be a strategic victory by Iran or Russia, not humanitarianism.
So Syria has 93,000 dead after two years of war, and yet we’re also supposed to believe that only about 100,000 Iraqis died after six years of the Iraq War.
It doesn’t add up, frankly.
Well, some Syrians are actually Christians.
@Rafer Janders:
Yeah, but not the right color. Lots of Rwandans and Congolese are Christians too.