Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Muallem speaks during a press conference (AFP)

More than 270,000 people have been killed and more than half of the Syrian nation has emigrated. Whole areas have been exposed to destruction and all of this has been caused by the ongoing war in Syria which is entering its sixth year. The situation has been described by the United Nations as the “largest humanitarian tragedy since the end of World War II”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has stated that 270,138 people, most of whom were fighters, have been killed while the number of civilian deaths is estimated at 80,000 of which 13,500 are children, in the conflict that began with the repression of peaceful demonstrations against President Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian regime. This repression has turned into a multilateral complex war in which foreign forces are involved. These statistics do not include the thousands of missing people, detainees in regime prisons and hundreds of the regime’s soldiers who are being detained by armed opposition and jihadist groups.

According to the Syrian Observatory statistics published in March 2015, 13,000 Syrians have been tortured in the regime’s prisons since the beginning of the conflict. There are still more than 200,000 people in these prisons.