More than 200,000 dead in Syrian conflict in less than four years

More than 200,000 people have perished in the Syrian civil war in the last four years, a monitoring group said.

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdul Rahman said the organisation had documented the killing of 202,354 people since March 2011, adding that more than 130,000 of them were combatants, Gulf News reported.

Rahman said that of the total, 63,074 of the killed were civilians, including 10,377 children.

He said that among the anti-regime fighters, 37,324 were Syrian rebels, while 22,624 were non-Syrian- mainly the Islamist militants.

Meanwhile, on the regime side, those dead included 44,237 soldiers, 28,974 members of the (paramilitary) National Defence Force, 624 members of (Lebanon's Shiite) Hezbollah, and 2,388 pro-regime Shiite fighters from beyond Syria and Lebanon.

A funding crisis has forced the UN to suspend its World Food Programme, affecting more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, who are thriving on food vouchers provided to them by the organisation.

According to The Guardian, the WFP has brought food to millions of Syrians inside the country, and has used the voucher programme - which allows refugees to buy food in local shops - to inject about 800m dollars (500m pounds) into the economies of those countries hosting them.

The WFP on Monday announced that it was suspending the scheme after it failed to procure the much needed 64m dollars to support Syrian refugees.

Following the shortage of funds, the UN body has cut down on rations within Syria, where it is trying to help 4.25 million people.