More than 1 in 10 Syrians killed or injured, report says
Nearly half the population said to be refugees within and outside Syria, and civil war has dropped life expectancy from 70 to 55
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
More than one in every 10 Syrians has either been killed or injured during the ongoing bloody civil war there, and nearly half the population has been displaced, according to a new report.
Most of the country’s capital, infrastructure and institutions have been “almost totally destroyed,” the Syrian Center for Policy Research said in the upcoming report, according to the Guardian.
The paper said 11.5 percent of Syrians have either been killed or hurt during the five-year conflict: 400,000 dead as a direct result of military action and a further 70,000 from related causes such as poor healthcare, shortage of medicine and food, and lack of access to clean water; and 1.9 million wounded. A United Nations estimate from August 2015 put the number of dead at “over 250,000 dead and 12 million displaced.”
UN-sponsored peace talks are scheduled to restart in Geneva on February 25, although a spokesman for the Syrian opposition said last week that US President Barack Obama is seeking to halt Russia’s military onslaught first.
The most recent Russian-backed offensive, near Aleppo, prompted opposition groups to walk out of peace talks last month while forcing tens of thousands of civilians to flee toward the Turkish border.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were set to meet Thursday in Munich in the wake of a reported Russian proposal Wednesday to set March 1 for a ceasefire in Syria.
According to the report, the brutal war has brought Syrian life expectancy down from 70 before the conflict to 55.4, and 45% of the prewar population has been forced to move — 6.36 million within Syria and a further 4 million who have fled overseas.
Almost 14 million Syrians have lost their livelihood in an economy that has suffered $255 billion worth of damage, the report said.
The United Nations Refugee Agency published figures Sunday showing that nearly 4.6 million Syrians had registered as refugees. Of those, the organization registered 2.1 million Syrians in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, 1.9 million were registered by Turkey, and more than 26,700 in North Africa.
Between April 2011 and December 2015, just under 900,000 Syrians applied for asylum in Europe, nearly two-thirds of them in Serbia and Germany and nearly a third in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Hungary and Austria, the UN said.
A pledging conference hosted in London a week ago by the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Kuwait and the UN raised $6 billion for humanitarian assistance with promises of continued support for more than 22.5 million people within Syria and across the region in 2016. A further $5 billion was pledged for humanitarian and development programs through 2020.
Germany led the charge, pledging $1.3 billion for 2016 and a similar package for 2017. The EU promised $1.2 billion for 2016, the US $925 million, Britain $730 million and Norway $278 million.
AP contributed to this report.
The Times of Israel Community.