Syria
A woman leaves the morgue at Al-Mojtahed hospital in Damascus, Syria, on December 11, 2024. Photo: Hussein Malla/AP
Erbil, Kurdistan Region - At least 21,000 people lost their lives in Syria in 2024, with more than 18,000 being civilians, including children and women, a war monitor reported on Wednesday, and 3,000 non-civilians were killed.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, documented the death of 21,402 people in 2024. The monitor verified the death of over 14,000 people under torture in prisons of the former regime of Bashar al-Assad through official documents found in those prisons following the fall of the regime, according to a press release by the monitor.
The monitor added that “18,223 people [civilians], including 337 children under the age of 18, and 240 women over the age of 18,” were killed.
Out of the high number of civilian casualties, 14,625 were killed by torture in prisons under the previous regime. The rest were victims caught between the crossfire, bombardment, and clashes between different forces.
As the regime collapsed, chilling stories about inmates of the Sednaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus began to emerge. These stories provide a disturbing look into how the Assad family brutally treated prisoners during their decades-long rule.
The monitor also recorded the deaths of 3,179 non-civilians. Most of them were members of the former regime forces. The rest were fighters from different military factions including Islamist and rebel factions, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and affiliates, Iran-backed militias, Islamic State (ISIS), Russian soldiers, and others.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) spearheaded a coalition of rebel groups in a major offensive against the Syrian army in late November, capturing major cities, including the capital Damascus, as Bashar al-Assad fled the country to Russia, ending over five decades of Baathist rule.
Rebel groups in Syria, under the supervision of HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), have agreed to dissolve and merge into the country’s defense ministry, the new administration announced last week.
Thousands of former Syrian soldiers have surrendered to HTS under a national reconciliation process aimed at reintegrating Assad's former forces into the new administration.
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