Syria: Graphics show the bloody outcome of the war

With his flight to Moscow, Bashar al-Assad's rule in Syria ended unexpectedly and abruptly. More than 13 years of the dictator's war against his own people left a sad result: hundreds of thousands of stars, millions of people are on the run and large parts of the country are destroyed.

The non-governmental organization “The Syrian Network for Human Rights” (SNHR) has made it its mission to document the victims of the war. To do this, it collects data from various sources and stores it in a database. On its website, the network claims to be the United Nations' primary source for all statistics on the death toll in Syria. The SNHR puts the number of civilians killed since the war began in March 2023 at well over 230,000. The information cannot be independently verified.

The graphic shows how many civilian deaths the individual conflict parties in Syria are responsible for, according to the SNHR.

The troops of the Assad regime were responsible for most of the deaths among the civilian population. Thousands of people also died as a result of attacks by the Russian Air Force. The opposition and insurgent forces and their allies have also killed thousands of civilians.

Immediately after the fall of Assad, the rebels stormed the notorious Saidnaya prison, known in Syria as a “slaughterhouse”. Here the dictator had opposition members followed and executed en masse. In total, the SNHR documented more than 15,300 torture deaths since the start of the war, with 15,100 stars, 98 percent of them at the hands of government forces. Women and children were also among the victims of torture.

According to the SHNR, nearly 160,000 people were still under arrest or missing after being arbitrarily arrested at the end of August, according to the SHNR. As with the deaths, by far the majority of those imprisoned and disappeared are attributable to the overthrown regime and the troops and aides of those in power, followed by the Islamic State and the opposition forces.

War makes you homeless: According to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, more than 13.8 million people are fleeing the civil war. Most of them are internally refugees in their own country, more than three million fled in neighboring Turkey and more than 1.5 million in the other neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

No country in Europe has taken in as many war refugees from Syria as Germany. A large number of them came to the Federal Republic in the summer of 2015. As soon as the Assad regime fell, discussion began about their possible repatriation.

After more than 13 years of war, Syria is a largely destroyed country. The World Bank published a damage assessment in 2022 looking at wartime destruction for selected Syrian cities, as well as areas such as physical and social infrastructure and the environment. The total damage caused by the war was estimated at 11.3 billion dollars, which corresponds to around 10.8 billion euros. The traffic to Aleppo is the hardest. In the former trading metropolis and tourist stronghold, massive Russian air strikes in 2016 caused estimated damage of more than three billion euros.

The graphic shows the estimated damage in Syria in various areas such as infrastructure, education, healthcare and housing. They range between high and low estimates. Bitter for the already war-torn country: In February 2023, a severe earthquake in the Turkish-Syrian border area caused further massive destruction.

At the end of 50 years of tyranny by the Assad clan, the system in Syria collapsed within a few days. A people breathes a sigh of relief. But after 13 years of war, the results are bitter. Syrians, like the rest of the world, are asking themselves: What comes next?