Nature halts Syria war
A group monitoring Syria's war said Thursday that it had recorded no deaths in the conflict for the first time in three years as a rare snowstorm forced a halt to fighting.
"We did not document any new killings on Wednesday," Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.
"While humanitarian needs soared, the snowstorm protected Syrians from battles, gunfire, shelling, rocket fire and air strikes," he said.
Other activist networks also reported no deaths on Wednesday.
The storm hit Syria and other parts of the Middle East on Wednesday, leaving much of the country including Damascus blanketed in snow and causing fuel and electricity shortages.
Fighting and shelling resumed on Thursday as the weather improved, said the Observatory, which relies on a wide network of sources inside Syria to monitor the conflict.
Syria's civil war has killed more than 200,000 people since breaking out in March 2011 as a peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that evolved into an armed conflict.
In December alone, at least 4,358 people were killed in the war, the Observatory said.
Meanwhile, the number of Syrian refugees grew by 704,000 in the first six months of last year and they are now the largest group under the UN refugee agency's mandate, a United Nations report said Wednesday.
The UNHCR also forecast that the number of Syrian refugees could shoot up to 4.27 million by December from the current figure of more than three million.
The mid-year review came as the head of the UN refugee agency warned of the worst displacement problem in seven decades.
"The Syria and Iraq mega-crises, the multiplication of new crises and the old crises that seem never to die have created the worst displacement situation in the world since World War II," UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday.
He said the number had topped 50 million for the first time since 1945.
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