Syria death toll over 150,000, says human rights body
At least 150,000 people have been killed in Syria's three-year-old civil war, a third of them civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said.
The UK-based Observatory, which monitors violence in Syria through a network of activists and medical or security sources, said the real toll was likely to be significantly higher at about 220,000 deaths.
Efforts to end the conflict by bringing together representatives of President Bashar al-Assad's government and the opposition have so far failed. The United Nations peace mediator for Syria said last week that talks were unlikely to resume soon.
The last UN figures, released in July 2013, put the death toll at at least 100,000 but it said in January it would stop updating the toll as conditions on the ground made it impossible to make accurate estimates.
The Observatory said it had registered the deaths of 150,344 people since 18 March 2011, when Assad's security forces first fired on protesters calling for reform.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/01/syria-civil-war-death-toll-150000
