<div><span style="font-size: 1rem;"><b>More than 4,360 people, including combatants and civilians, were killed in Syria’s civil war in 2023, in the thirteenth year since fighting began, a war monitor said today.</b></span><br></div><div><br></div><div>The figure is an increase from 2022 in which 3,825 people were killed.</div><div><br></div><div>That was the lowest annual death toll since the conflict began in 2011 with the government’s brutal crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy protests, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.</div><div><br></div><div>This year’s count included 1,889 civilians, with 241 of them women and 307 children among them, according to the UK-based Observatory, which has a network of sources inside Syria.</div><div><br></div><div>Syrian government forces accounted for almost 900 of the dead this year, with other fighters including from the Kurdish-led and US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, pro-Iran groups, Islamist factions, Islamic State group jihadists, and foreign combatants accounting for the rest.</div><div><br></div><div>Over the years, the country’s conflict spiralled dramatically. It pulled in foreign armies, militias, and jihadists, killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions, and ravaged the country’s infrastructure and industry.</div><div><br></div><div>With Iranian and Russian support, Damascus has clawed back much of the territory it lost earlier in the conflict, although large parts of the country’s north remain outside government control.</div><div><br></div><div>Frontlines have mostly quietened in recent years and annual death tolls dropped to lower levels.</div><div><br></div><div>Nevertheless, violence persists. The Observatory reported that several people including a fighter and a child were killed yesterday in government bombardment of “residential areas and a market” in the city of Idlib.</div><div><br></div><div>Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist group led by Al-Qaeda’s former Syria branch, controls swathes of Idlib province and parts of neighbouring Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia provinces – the last major bastion of armed opposition in Syria.</div><div><br></div><div>A ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey was declared in Idlib after a Syrian government offensive in March 2020, but it has been repeatedly violated.</div><div><br></div><div>Also yesterday, 25 pro-Iran fighters were killed in airstrikes in eastern Syria “likely” carried out by Israel, the Observatory said, raising an earlier toll of 23.</div><div><br></div><div>The dead included five Syrians, six Iraqi fighters, four from Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, and 10 other non-Syrian combatants, the Observatory said.</div><div><br></div><div>Israel, which has launched hundreds of strikes on Syrian territory since the war began, rarely comments on individual attacks but has repeatedly said it will not allow its arch-foe Iran to expand its presence in the country.</div><div><br></div><div>Israel has intensified its strikes in Syria since its war with Hamas began on Oct 7. - AFP&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>bnbd24/fas</div>