Syrian war fatalities have reached 470,000, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research (SCPR), close to double the estimate used by the UN, which stopped collecting these ghoulish statistics 18 months ago. The report, titled “Confronting Fragmentation,” is the latest in a series of reports by the SCPR, titled, “Syrian Catastrophe,” “War on Development,” “Squandering Humanity,” and “Alienation and Violence.”
With 1.9 million wounded, the new report estimates that 11.5% of Syrians have been killed or injured since the start of the civil war, in March 2011. Syria’s mortality rate has increased from 4.4 per thousand in 2010 to 10.9 per thousand in 2015, and life expectancy has dropped from 70 in 2010 to 55.4 in 2015. Health, education and income standards have all severely deteriorated. Poverty has increased by 85% in 2015—compared with 2014. Overall economic losses are estimated at $255 billion.
Syria’s population was about 21 million when the antigovernment protests against President Bashar Assad began in 2011 (remember the “Arab Spring?”). The spring thing was met with a brutal crackdown, an Assad family specialty, but this time resistance wasn’t quelled, and a civil war erupted, drawing in opposing armies from around the region and even the globe.
The Syrian population has shrunk by 21%, feeding the enormous wave of refugees flooding Europe. The report says that as many as 45% of Syrians have been displaced, 6.36 million internally and more than 4 million abroad.
Rabie Nasser, the report’s author, told the Guardian: “We use very rigorous research methods and we are sure of this figure.” He also warned that “indirect deaths will be greater in the future, though most NGOs and the UN ignore them. We think that the UN documentation and informal estimation underestimated the casualties due to lack of access to information during the crisis.”