Over 230,000 Civilians Killed in Syria Since 2011
The al-Assad family’s regime fell after 54 years of power. In a two-week long offensive, Syrian rebels swept across the country, capturing Damascus and, on December 8, President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow. Mohammed al-Bashir, who leads one of the armed opposition groups (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), has now taken charge as interim prime minister until March 1.
It’s been 13 years since a popular uprising in Syria was met with a heavy crackdown from the regime, leading to a civil war that internally displaced 7.2 million people and forced a further 6.4 million Syrians to flee abroad as refugees. Data from the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) states that more than 230,000 civilians were killed between March 2011 and March 2024, with 30,193 children and 16,451 women included in the death toll.
According to the SNHR, the vast majority of those killed were at the hands of the Syrian regime forces and Iranian militias (201,260 people or 87 percent of the total). Per the report, a further 6,969 civilians were killed by Russian forces (3 percent), 5,056 by ISIS (2.2 percent), 4,227 by armed opposition factions/ Syria National Army (1.8 percent), 3,055 by U.S.-led International Coalition forces (1.3 percent), 1,491 by Syrian Democratic Forces (0.7 percent), 538 by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (0.2 percent), 4 by Turkestan Islamist Party and 8,678 civilians killed by other parties (3.8 percent).
As this chart shows, civilian deaths peaked in the year March 2012 to March 2013, when at least 66,046 people were killed, followed by the next year (March 2013 to March 2014) when 61,063 deaths were recorded. Approximately 56 percent of all civilian deaths documented between March 2011 and March 2024 occurred in this two year time frame. Every Syrian governorate has seen civilian deaths over the past 13 years.
The report also cites how an estimated 15,334 of these civilians were killed in this period due to torture and details how 222 chemical weapons attacks were carried out, 217 of which the report says were at the hands of the Syrian regime.