Syria Death Toll Crosses 191,000 Mark

More than 191,000 people have been killed during the three years of civil war in Syria, the United Nations human rights chief revealed Friday.

The number refers to the period from March 2011 to April 2014. This is the first statistics to be released by the UN human rights office since July 2013, when the number of dead in the Syrian conflict was 100,000. Therefore, in just a matter of one year the figure almost doubled.

According to the New York Times, this is the third report by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which identified as many as 191,369 deaths from the beginning of the conflict in March 2011 to April 2014. Almost 85 percent of the victims were men, while 9 percent were women. However, in the remaining cases, the sex of the victims remained unknown. The degree of brutality can be known from the number of children deaths - which according to the records is at least 8,800.

Navi Pillay, the agency's chief, said that the number was "probably an underestimate". She further went on to criticize the Western nations, saying that the "international paralysis" on an issue as grave as this only led to "empowering and emboldening" the slaughterers, BBC reports.

 "Tragically, it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict," Pillay said in a statement accompanying the report. The report also stated that many killings in the war-stricken country remained undocumented; which means, the number could be way beyond the quoted figure.

The Washington Post rightly describes the Syrian conflict as "a complex, multi-layered war where various factions fight each other"