3. Syrians have lost the basic dignity of being counted
The number of civilians killed in the besieged enclave of Eastern Ghouta since February 18 might be 1,100, if you believe the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Doctors Without Borders said it crossed 1,000 on Friday. And the local health authority says it is well over 1,300.
It is hard to be sure how many have died during a relentless aerial and artillery bombardment of the area, once the breadbasket of Damascus, where at least 300,000 people still live.
That is because many are still, and might always be, under the rubble of their destroyed homes. Some are buried by their families immediately after they are recovered, rather than taken to hospitals where they will be added to the death toll.
It is a striking fact that despite knowing 200 people have probably been killed, it is the circumstances of their death that has precluded them from being counted.
After terrorist attacks around the world, personal stories of those prematurely robbed of their lives are often circulated and retold with images of them smiling, so that the victims do not become a mere number.
Syrians have long lost the luxury of being counted.
The UN stopped counting civilian casualties in Syria in late 2013, after the death toll passed 100,000. It said it could no longer reliably verify figures it was receiving from various sources.
The UN’s Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said in April 2016 that his estimate of the casualties was 400,000, while the Syrian Centre for Policy Research said it was as high as 470,000. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday that the figure was 511,000, including fighters on all sides of the conflict.
The lowest death toll is by the Violations Documentation Centre, which has identified 160,247 dead because it often tries to find out their names and publish them on the database.
They have been killed by various deliberate means: air strikes, shelling, suicide bombs, barrel bombs, sarin gas, explosive weapons and mines, incendiary armaments, gas cylinders used as mortars, sniper fire, machineguns, by burning, drowning and beheading.
All of the figures are probably underestimates. They do not include those who have died under torture in the notorious prisons of President Bashar Al Assad’s regime, or who were made to disappear by ISIL in its reign of terror that captured part of the country in 2014.
They do not include those who starved to death under medieval sieges, or were felled by chronic illnesses such as diabetes or kidney failure because the lack of medical supplies under blockade meant they could not have dialysis machines or pills that would aid their survival.
No one knows how many bodies remain unclaimed under the rubble of homes that caved in during the last desperate weeks in the siege of Aleppo. And there is no count of those buried under the cement that once stood as their homes before the shelling in Eastern Ghouta.
In neighbouring Lebanon, 17,000 people who disappeared during the country’s 15-year civil war remain missing, many in Syrian government prisons. Their families still gather at the tent of the disappeared outside the UN offices in Beirut, 35 years after their first meeting. As long as there are no answers, the wounds will fester and there will be no closure.
Despite the sheer carnage and the scale and length of civilian suffering in Syria, which has often prompted what aid officials describe as donor and audience fatigue, the name of a child that accompanies an image of her dusty face after death is always a slap in the face.
The name is a reminder of a life unlived, of dreams yet to be born that were cruelly crushed under the heel of a thermobaric missile or the shrapnel of a barrel bomb.
But if the dead remain at the very least uncounted, when the guns finally fall silent in tortured Syria, will all those ghosts be at rest?
No one can say exactly how many lives the war has claimed … but it would seem that Syrian civilians no longer count