The overall death toll for Syria’s civil war has crept up to 387,000 following the least deadly of 10 years of conflict.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a wide network of sources inside Syria, said the new figure included almost 117,000 civilians, among them more than 22,000 children.
The Observatory’s previous tally was issued in January and stood at more than 380,000.
The fighting, which erupted in 2011 after the brutal repression of anti-government protests, has largely abated this year as a ceasefire held in northwestern Syria and attention turned to containing the coronavirus pandemic.
The latest toll included more than 130,500 pro-government fighters, among them foreigners. More than half of those were Syrian soldiers, while 1,703 were from the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah whose members have been fighting in Syria since 2013.
The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 57,000 non-jihadist rebel fighters. It has also killed more than 67,500 jihadists, mainly from the Islamic State group and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group dominated by ex-members of Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate.
More than 12,500 Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces fighters have been killed in battles against IS and Turkish forces.
