Syria war death toll over 507,000, 13 years on

Syria war death toll over 507,000, 13 years on
Syrian children queue to receive food distributed by aid workers at a makeshift camp north of Aleppo. (AFP/File)
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Updated 14 March 2024
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Syria war death toll over 507,000, 13 years on

Syria war death toll over 507,000, 13 years on
  • More than 164,000 civilians, including more than 15,000 women and 25,000 children, have been killed
  • More than 343,000 combatants, including army soldiers, fighters from pro-Iran groups, Kurdish-led forces and Daesh group militants, are also among the dead

BEIRUT: Syria’s war has killed more than 507,000 people, a war monitor said Thursday ahead of the 13th anniversary of the conflict which has displaced millions at home and abroad.
The government’s brutal suppression of an uprising that erupted on March 15, 2011, triggered a full-scale civil war that drew in foreign armies and international militants.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said more than 164,000 civilians, including more than 15,000 women and 25,000 children, have been killed.
More than 343,000 combatants, including army soldiers, fighters from pro-Iran groups, Kurdish-led forces and Daesh group militants, are also among the dead, added the Observatory, which has a network of sources across the country.
The overall figure has risen from around 503,000 last March, with the frontlines mostly quietening in recent years.
Syrian President Bashar Assad has gradually clawed back territory lost early in the fighting with help from allies Iran and Russia, but large swathes of the north remain outside government control.
The United Nations has said that this year, 16.7 million people in Syria require some type of humanitarian assistance or protection, “the largest number since the beginning of the crisis in 2011.”
The war has ravaged Syria’s economy, infrastructure and industry, while Western sanctions have added to the country’s woes.
Syria is home to around 7.2 million internally displaced people, the UN says, with a devastating earthquake that struck Turkiye and Syria in February last year compounding the problem.
Ninety percent of the population is living in poverty, but UN humanitarian official David Carden said last week that funding challenges could affect aid deliveries and services.
Suhair Zakkout, Damascus-based spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said 13 years of war have had “devastating consequences” on Syrians across the country, causing “unimaginable pain.”
“Syria has a full generation... who has only witnessed the loss, the displacement, the war, and they know nothing but these things,” Zakkout said.
Humanitarian organizations are working “to sustain the minimum level of the basic services” such as water and health so that “they don’t collapse,” Zakkout said.
UN-facilitated efforts toward a political process remain stalled.
Special envoy Geir Pedersen said last month that Moscow and Damascus had rejected holding talks in Geneva, the venue for previous negotiations aimed at forging a new constitution for Syria.
Last year, Syria returned to the Arab League, marking Assad’s return to the regional fold after a suspension of more than a decade.


Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort

Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort
Updated 7 sec ago
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Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort

Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort
ANKARA: The body of an eight-year-old girl who had been missing in Turkiye for 19 days has been found after an enormous manhunt, the interior minister said on Sunday.
The body of Narin Guran was found in a bag in a river in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir, around one kilometer from the village where she lived with her family, Diyarbakir governor Murat Zorluoglu told reporters.
“Unfortunately, the lifeless body of Narin, who went missing in the village of Tavsantepe... has been found,” Turkish interior minister Ali Yerlikaya wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
She disappeared on August 21, sparking a huge search effort in Turkiye, with a number of well-known figures joining a social media campaign called “Find Narin.”
“Narin Guran was found dead wearing the same clothes as the last time she was seen,” said Zorluoglu.
“Based on the first observations, she was put into a bag after she was killed. The bag was then placed in the river, hidden under branches and rocks so as not to raise suspicion,” he added.
Diyarbakir prosecutors have detained 21 people, said Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc.
The girl’s uncle was arrested last week on suspicion of murder and “deprivation of liberty.”
“Our president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is following the case closely to guarantee that the ongoing investigation continues thoroughly and that those who took Narin’s life answer before the law,” the president’s communications director Fahrettin Altun said on X.
Turkiye’s pro-Kurdish party DEM has called for a march to take place in Diyarbakir on Sunday evening.
“Narin was killed in an organized manner. Those responsible for this murder, which has saddened us all, must be revealed and held accountable before an impartial and independent justice system,” DEM wrote on X.
Tunc said on X that “those responsible for Narin’s death will be brought to justice.”

Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians

Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians
Updated 08 September 2024
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Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians

Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians

PORT SUDAN: Sudan has rejected a call by UN experts for the deployment of an “independent and impartial force” to protect millions of civilians driven from their homes by more than a year of war.
The conflict since April last year, pitting the army against paramilitary forces, has killed tens of thousands of people and triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The independent UN experts said Friday their fact-finding mission had uncovered “harrowing” violations by both sides, “which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
They called for “an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians” to be deployed “without delay.”
The Sudanese foreign ministry, which is loyal to the army under General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, said in a statement late Saturday that “the Sudanese government rejects in their entirety the recommendations of the UN mission.”
It called the UN Human Rights Council, which created the fact-finding mission last year, “a political and illegal body,” and the panel’s recommendations “a flagrant violation of their mandate.”
The UN experts said eight million civilians have been displaced and another two million people have fled to neighboring countries.
More than 25 million people — upwards of half the country’s population — face acute food shortages.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on a visit to Sudan on Sunday, said: “The scale of the emergency is shocking, as is the insufficient action being taken to curtail the conflict and respond to the suffering it is causing.”
In Port Sudan, where government offices and the United Nations have relocated to due to the intense fighting in the capital Khartoum, Tedros called on the “world to wake up and help Sudan out of the nightmare it is living through.”
The Sudanese foreign ministry statement accused the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Burhan’s former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, of “systematically targeting civilians and civilian institutions.”
“The protection of civilians remains an absolute priority for the Sudanese government,” it said.
The statement added that the UN Human Rights Council’s role should be “to support the national process, rather than seek to impose a different exterior mechanism.”
It also rejected the experts’ call for an arms embargo.


Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip

Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip
Updated 08 September 2024
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Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip

Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip
  • Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to meet senior Iraqi officials

TEHRAN: Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian will visit neighboring Iraq on Wednesday, state media reported Sunday, in what will be his first trip abroad since he took office in July.
Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to meet senior Iraqi officials.
The visit comes at the invitation of Iraq’s premier, Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani, the official IRNA news agency quoted Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad Mohammad Kazem Al-Sadegh as saying.
The two countries will sign memoranda of understanding on cooperation and security, Sadegh said, without elaborating.
He said the agreements were to have been signed during a planned visit to Iraq by Iran’s late president, Ebrahim Raisi.
But Raisi was killed in May along with the then foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, when their helicopter crashed on a fog-shrouded mountainside in northern Iran.
Since taking office, Pezeshkian has vowed to “prioritize” strengthening ties with the Islamic republic’s neighbors.
Relations between Iran and Iraq, both Shiite-majority countries, have grown closer over the past two decades.
Tehran is one of Iraq’s leading trade partners, and wields considerable political influence in Baghdad where its Iraqi allies dominate parliament and the current government.
In March 2023 the two countries signed a security agreement covering their common border, months after Tehran struck Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq’s north.
They have since agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and remove them from border areas.
Tehran accuses the groups of importing arms from Iraq and of fomenting 2022 protests that erupted after the death in custody of Iranian-Kurd woman Mahsa Amini.
In January, Iran launched a deadly strike in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, saying it had targeted a site used by “spies of the Zionist regime (Mossad).”
On Saturday, an exiled Iranian Kurdish group said one of its activists, Behzad Khosrawi, had been arrested in Iraq’s northern city of Sulaimaniyah and handed over to “Iranian intelligence.”
Local Asayesh security forces said Khosrawi was arrested “because he did not have residency” in the Kurdish region, and denied he had any connection to “political activism.”


Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations

Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations
Updated 08 September 2024
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Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations

Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations

ALGIERS: Algerian presidential candidate Abdelaali Hassani Cherif’s campaign said in a statement on Sunday that it had recorded cases of violations in the country’s Saturday presidential election, initial results of which have yet to be announced.
The campaign said the violations included putting pressure on some polling station officials to inflate the results, failure to deliver vote-sorting records to the candidates’ representatives, and instances of proxy group voting.
Algerians voted on Saturday in an election in which military-backed President Abdulmadjid Tebboune is widely expected to win a second term.


Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing

Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing
Updated 08 September 2024
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Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing

Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing
  • Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service confirmed the toll
  • Israeli police say ‘shooter’ killed, without providing further details

JERUSALEM: Three people have been shot and killed near the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, Israeli first responders said Sunday.

Israeli police said the shooter was killed, without providing further details. The border crossing is used by Palestinians, Israelis and international tourists. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service was at the scene and confirmed the toll.

The Israeli-occupied West Bank has seen a surge of violence since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Israel has launched near-daily military arrest raids into dense Palestinian residential areas, and there has also been a rise in settler violence and Palestinian attacks on Israelis.