SYRIA: 340 000 People have been killed since the start of the war in 2011

More than 340,000 people, including more than 100,000 civilians, have been killed since the start of the war in Syria in 2011, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) said Friday.

This new record is being announced as several foreign powers intensify their diplomatic efforts to end this deadly conflict, and a few days before a new round of peace talks under the auspices of the United Nations. Geneva.

The Observatory, which has an extensive network of sources in the country at war, has documented the death of 343,511 people in Syrian territory between mid-March 2011 and the beginning of November 2017.

Among them are 102,618 civilians, including nearly 19,000 children and 12,000 women, the same source told AFP.

According to the OSDH, more than 119,000 members of the pro-government forces were killed, including 62,000 Syrian soldiers and 1,556 Lebanese Hezbollah members.

Meanwhile, some 59,000 rebel faction and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters - a Washington-backed Arab-Kurdish alliance - have been killed.

The deaths also include more than 62,200 fighters from the various jihadist groups, an increase of 4,000 deaths compared to the latest report of the OSDH published in July.

In the last four months, some 12,000 people have been killed throughout Syria, including 3001 civilians.

A "de-escalation" agreement was reached in May, bringing relative calm to some parts of the country, but the violence exploded elsewhere.

"Even though the de-escalation agreements have reduced the toll of civilian casualties, the violent offensives against ISIS in other areas have resulted in civilians dying at the same rate," says OSDH director Rami Abdel Rahman. .

Russian-backed regime forces and Syrian and Kurdish fighters, backed by the US, have been conducting separate offensives in recent months against the Islamic State (IS) armed group, including in Raqa (north) and Deir Ezzor. (East).

Triggered in 2011 with the repression of pacifist protests by the regime, the conflict in Syria has become more complex over the years with the involvement of foreign countries and jihadist groups in an increasingly fragmented territory.