In a chaotic situation such as the war in Syria, it is nearly impossible to provide precise numbers of those killed and wounded in the fighting. Assigning responsibility for the casualties is harder again.
Nevertheless, the data we do have highlight the murderous response of the Syrian government to the crisis in which it is involved. It also serves to underscore the hyperbole surrounding the Islamic State (ISIS).
In the early days of the conflict, much of the bodycount work done was very detailed. Information was cross-checked with different sources and, where possible, the names of the victims and the date and location of their injuries or deaths included.
Many organizations have tried at some point to monitor various aspects of the conflict—from archaeological damage to infrastructure destruction; from casualties to internally displaced people and refugees. These include: the United Nations; the Syrian Center for Statistics and Research; the Syrian Center for Policy Research; the Syrian Network for Human Rights; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights; and the Violations Documentation Center.
These groups regularly supply their findings to the international media and on their websites.
However, the United Nations gave up counting casualties in January 2014. Some of the organizations with which it had been cooperating at the beginning of the conflict favored the opposition. This reduced the reliability and value of the figures provided.
This concern has been supported by some media reporting which suggested, for example, that some of the deaths reported by the various monitoring groups as civilian deaths were deaths of fighters.
Even ISIS provides details on its website and in its annual reports of deaths of its own fighters and of casualties they have inflicted.
