Day 1,170: Syria’s government has killed nearly 2,000 in Aleppo in six months
A man stands looking at bodies wrapped in shrouds lying on the ground following a reported air strike by government forces on May 30, 2014 in Aleppo.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, one of the few groups still trying to count deaths in Syria, and the most widely cited, said Friday that so far this year, the government's barrel bombs have killed 1,963 people in Aleppo alone. That figure, they said, includes 567 people under the age of 18. Barrel bombs kill an average of 14 people per day in this city. Read more on this over at Al Jazeera. '
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights recently put the total death count in the Syrian conflict at over 162,000.
In other news:
Late yesterday US officials confirmed that a man who carried out a suicide attack in Syria, whom extremist rebels claiming responsibilty for the attack said was American, was indeed a US citizen. Only last week, American intelligence officials speaking to The Daily Beast admitted that the latest estimates of the number of Americans in the conflict is much larger than it was last fall. These officials, who put the latest estimates at "more than 100," also said that some of these fighters have now returned to the US — they know the location of "some," but not others. As in the UK and France, there's concern that radicalized fighters will return to carry out terrorist attacks in their home countries.
The conflict continues.