01/03/2013, 00.00
SYRIA
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UN: Victims of Syrian conflict top 60 thousand

According to a study commissioned by the Commission for Human Rights. 76% of those killed were men, 7.5 women. The UN High Commissioner: The dead are caused by both sides in the conflict. The allegation of Sister Agnes Mariam de la Croix: A Christian was beheaded and thrown to the dogs. The West supports the Islamists.

Geneva (AsiaNews / Agencies) - More than 60 thousand people have been killed in Syria since March 2011 - which initially began as part of the Arab spring - until the civil war of today.  The figures have been provided by the UN Human Rights Commission, which released a study carried out by the Benetech research center that shows that up until November 2012, there were 59,648 deaths in Syria.

Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner says that by now that figure has been exceeded by far. In recent days, the Syrian opposition had declared that the dead were 45 thousand.

The Benetech center has checked the lists of victims available from seven different sources, the opposition and the government, and kept count only of those with full names, date and place of the death. Precisely for this reason the authors warn that the figure of 59,648 is minimal, since there are many dead and many killings not reported by sources or missing some data.

The study fails to indicate whether the victims are soldiers or civilians, but it shows that 76.1% of those killed were male, and the 7.5 are women. The graphs on different sites, show that the most affected areas are the suburbs of Damascus and the province of Homs.

Pillay stressed several times that the deaths were caused by both sides in the conflict, government soldiers and armed opposition groups.

This statement is very important because the information that arrives in the West is often anti-Assad and especially stresses the violent actions of the regular army. But there are also the violence of the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic fundamentalist groups fighting against the regime.

In recent days, Sister Agnes-Mariam de la Croix, Superior of a Syrian Carmelite monastery, who had to seek refuge in Lebanon, broke the news of a Christian of 38 years, Andrei Arbashe, whose decapitated body was found along a street, prey to stray dogs. The nun says that man was executed only because his brother has expressed negative opinions about the rebels, accusing them of being bandits.

Sister Agnes Mariam accuses the West of supporting the rebels despite growing evidence of their gratuitous violence. "The democratic and free world is supporting the Islamists," she says.

 

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