Fast fünftausend Tote in Syrien im letzten Jahr

Es sind zwar längst nicht mehr so viele Opfer wie zu Hochzeiten des Bürgerkriegs in Syrien zu beklagen und doch sind im letzten Jahr fast fünftausend durch bewaffnete Konflikte getötet worden:

More than 4,360 people, including combatants and civilians, were killed in Syria's civil war in 2023, in the thirteenth year since fighting began, a war monitor said on Sunday.

The figure was an increase on 2022, when 3,825 people were killed.

That was the lowest annual death toll since the conflict began in 2011 said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

This year's count included 1,889 civilians, 241 of them women and 307 children, according to the United Kingdom-based observatory, which has a broad network of sources inside Syria.

Syrian government forces accounted for almost 900 of the dead this year, with other fighters including from the Kurdish-led and US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, pro-Iran groups, Islamist factions, the Daesh extremist group fighters and foreign combatants accounting for the rest.

Over the years, the country's conflict spiralled dramatically. It pulled in foreign armies, militias and terrorists, killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and ravaged the country's infrastructure and industry.

With Iranian and Russian support, Damascus has clawed back much of the territory it lost earlier in the conflict, although large parts of the country's north remain outside government control.

Front lines have mostly quietened in recent years and annual death tolls dropped to lower levels.

Nevertheless, violence persists. The Observatory reported that several people including a fighter and a child were killed on Saturday in government bombardment of "residential areas and a market" the city of Idlib.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, a jihadist group led by Al Qaeda's former Syria branch, controls swathes of Idlib province and parts of neighbouring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces, the last major bastion of armed opposition in Syria.