Including 719 at the hands of the Syrian-Russian Alliance
SNHR has published its periodic death toll report for the month of April 2017 in which it documented the killing of 1014 civilians at the hands of the main influential parties in Syria.
The report notes that SNHR team encounters difficulties in documenting victims from armed opposition factions as many of those victims are killed on battlefronts and not inside cities. Also, we aren’t able to obtain details such as names, pictures and other important details on account of the armed opposition forces’ unwillingness to reveal such information for security concerns among other reasons. Therefore, the actual number of victims is much greater than what is being recorded.
On the other side, the report stresses that it is almost impossible to access information about victims from Syrian regime forces or from ISIS and the margin of error is considerably higher due to the lack of any applicable methodology in this type of documentation. The Syrian government and ISIS don’t publish, reveal, or record their victims. From our perspective, the statistics published by some groups on this category of victims are fictitious and are not based on any actual data.
Therefore, the report only incudes civilian victims who were killed by all parties and compare them.
The report breaks down the death toll of April 2017 where Syrian regime forces killed 486 civilians including 98 children (three children are killed every day) and 82 women (adult female). Additionally, among the victims were 10 civilians who died due to torture.
The report notes that forces we believe are Russian killed 233 civilians including 97 children and 40 women.
Additionally, the report documented the killing of 18 civilians at the hands of the Kurdish Self-management forces including 6 children and 1 woman.
Furthermore, the report notes that ISIS killed 87 civilians including 85 civilians. Of the 85 civilians, 24 were children and 11 were women, while Fateh al Sham Front (formerly al Nussra) killed 2 civilians. In addition, armed opposition factions killed 25 civilians including 4 children and 3 women.
In addition, the report records that 86 civilians, including 24 children and 18 women, were killed by the international coalition forces in April 2017.
The report documents that 79 civilians, including 11 children and 17 women, have either died drowning as they were fleeing by sea or in bombings that SNHR hasn’t been able to identify its perpetrators, as of this writing, or by bullets or landmines that we couldn’t determine their source, or by Turkish, Jordanian, or Lebanese forces.
The report emphasizes that Syrian-Russian alliance forces have violated the international human rights law which guarantees the right to life. Furthermore, evidences and proofs, according to hundreds of eyewitnesses’ accounts, suggest that 90% at least of the widespread and single attacks were directed against civilians and civilian facilities.
Also, ISIS, Fateh al Sham Front, Kurdish Self-management forces, armed opposition factions, and international coalition forces, have perpetrated many crimes of extrajudicial killing which constitute war crimes.
The report calls on the Security Council and the relevant international entities to uphold their responsibilities in relation to the crimes of killing that is being perpetrated ceaselessly and to apply pressure on the Syrian government to stop the deliberate and indiscriminate shelling against civilians.
Finally, the report considers the Russian regime, all Shiite militias, and ISIS as foreign parties that are effectively involved in the killings and holds all of these parties and the financiers and supports of the Syrian regime legally and judicially responsible.