The European Union condemned in the strongest possible terms, on Friday 1 July, the deaths of over 300,000 civilians in Syria as a direct result of the conflict between 2011 and 2021.
“Every single day for the past 10 years, 83 civilians have died in Syria. This means that an estimated 306,887 civilians have been killed as a direct result of the conflict”, the spokesperson said in a statement, citing figures from the report ‘Civilian Deaths in the Syrian Arab Republic’, presented the previous day by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
According to the spokesperson, most of these crimes were perpetrated by the Syrian regime and its allies, including through the use of torture and other criminal methods. “Since the beginning of the conflict, the EU calls for accountability of those responsible for violating international humanitarian law”, the spokesperson said.
The report’s figures do not include indirect deaths, namely those resulting from loss of access to essential goods and services caused or aggravated by the conflict. According to the data, on average, one in every 13 deaths was a child (27,126) and 12,259 deaths were caused by “use of objects and other means that includes sexual violence, death in custody, torture, strangulation, mutilations, beheadings and hanging”. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)