No deaths recorded as snowstorm halts Syria fighting

Severe weather marks first day without casualties in three years of conflict

By AFP 8 January 2015, 5:25 pm

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A Syrian boy looks out through his tent door covered in snow at a refugee camp in Deir Zannoun village, in the Bekaa valley, east Lebanon, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2015. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A group monitoring Syria’s war said Thursday that the previous day it had recorded no deaths in the conflict for the first time in three years as a rare snowstorm forced a halt to fighting.

“We did not document any new killings on Wednesday,” Rami Abdul Rahman, the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.

“While humanitarian needs soared, the snowstorm protected Syrians from battles, gunfire, shelling, rocket fire and airstrikes,” he said.

Other activist networks also reported no deaths on Wednesday.

The storm hit Syria and other parts of the Middle East on Wednesday, leaving much of the country including Damascus blanketed in snow and causing fuel and electricity shortages.

Fighting and shelling resumed on Thursday as the weather improved, said the Observatory, which relies on a wide network of sources inside Syria to monitor the conflict.

Syria’s civil war has killed more than 200,000 people since breaking out in March 2011 as a peaceful uprising against President Bashar Assad that evolved into an armed conflict.

In December alone, at least 4,358 people were killed in the war, the Observatory said.