page_title: Casualties of the Syrian Civil War
section_title: Overall deaths
hierarchical_section_title: Casualties of the Syrian Civil War / Overall deaths
caption_attribution_description: English: Total deaths over time as a result of the Syrian civil war, based on data from the Syrian National Council. [1]
context_page_description: Estimates of the total number of deaths in the Syrian Civil War, by opposition activist groups, vary between 384,000 and about 586,100 as of March 2020. On 23 April 2016, the United Nations and Arab League Envoy to Syria put out an estimate of 400,000 that had died in the war. Based on Syria's pre-war population of 20.8 million from 2011, this represented approximately 2% of Syria's pre-war population.
  By mid-March 2020, the opposition activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the number of children killed in the conflict had risen to 22,075, and that 13,704 women had also been killed.
  By February 2017, Amnesty International estimated between 5,000 and 13,000 people had been executed in government prisons, and thousands more people are reported to have died due to torture by Syrian authorities.
context_section_description: All of the following totals include civilians, rebels and government forces:
  At the start of the war, Al Jazeera journalist Nir Rosen stated that many of the deaths reported daily by activists were in fact armed insurgents falsely presented as civilian deaths, but said that real civilian deaths do occur on a regular basis. Several Middle East analysts, including Sharmine Narwani from the Lebanese Al Akhbar newspaper and the UAE/Saudi Al Arabiya website, also urged caution.
  This was later confirmed when in late May 2012, Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is one of the opposition-affiliated groups counting the number of those killed in the uprising, stated that civilians who had taken up arms during the earliest days of the conflict were being counted under the category of "civilians" as they were not army nor army defectors.
  In May 2013, SOHR stated that at least 41,000 of those killed during the conflict were Alawites. By April 2015, reportedly a third of the country's 250,000 Alawites that were of fighting age had been killed. In April 2017, a pro-opposition source claimed 150,000 young Alawites had died.
caption: Weekly deaths over the course of the conflict in Syria (18 March 2011 – 18 October 2013)
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