Syria Crisis Death Toll Tops 230,000

Syria's brutal conflict has left more than 230,000 people dead including almost 11,500 children since it broke out in 2011, a monitoring group said yesterday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented the deaths of 230,618 people.

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The toll includes 69,494 civilians, among them 11,493 children and 7,371 women.

Combatants account for a majority of those killed, with 49,106 regime forces and 36,464 government loyalists among the dead. The Observatory documented the deaths of 41,116 rebels, Syrian jihadists and Kurdish fighters.

On the ground, an alliance of Syrian rebel forces seized a key army base in the south of the country in a new setback for the regime's embattled troops.

The Southern Front alliance took full control of the 52nd Brigade base in Daraa province after 24 hours of fierce clashes, a spokesman for the group told AFP.

The fall of the base is the latest in a string of defeats for the Syrian regime, which has lost territory to both rebel alliances and the jihadist Islamic State group.

Government troops have been all but driven from northwestern Idlib province in recent weeks by a coalition including al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front and other largely Islamist rebel forces.

It has lost the city of Palmyra and the surrounding region to the Islamic State group, which now controls around half of Syria's territory.