More than 2,000 killed in Syria since start of Ramadan, NGO says.

More than 2,000 killed in Syria since start of Ramadan, NGO says.

Free Syrian Army fighters pray along a street in Aleppo's
 Salaheddine neighborhood on July 9, 2013. (Reuters)

Al Arabia | 26 Jul 2013 :: At least 2,014 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war since the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began on July 10, a watchdog said on Thursday.

More than 1,323 of the dead were pro- and anti-regime fighters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said that the overall “toll has been particularly high in the past four days,” adding that both camps “concealed the real number of dead so the real toll is actually higher.”

The Britain-based Observatory said that 438 army soldiers were killed in Ramadan, and 69 members of the government’s paramilitary National Defense Force were killed.

Meanwhile, 545 civilians who joined the rebels were killed in the Muslim holy month. Thirty of them were soldiers who had defected from the Syrian army, and 241 were foreign and unidentified fighters.

The death toll also included 639 civilians, including 105 children and 99 women, most of whom were killed in army shelling, said the Observatory.

An additional 52 unidentified corpses were accounted for in the Observatory's toll.

According to the Observatory, more than 100,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict so far, which began after President Bashar al-Assad’s regime unleashed a brutal crackdown against a March 2011 popular revolt calling for change.

The United Nations estimates that some 5,000 people a month are dying in Syria's civil war.(Courtesy:Al Arabia)