The U.N.’s human rights office announced this week that it would no longer keep count of the death toll in Syria’s ongoing civil war due to an inability to keep precise statistics.
Many of the sources the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has used in the past are proving to be unreliable, according to The Associated Press. The office also said its inability to access many areas of the country contributes to the problem of keeping an accurate assessment of events in the war, which the U.N. said in July had claimed the lives of at least 100,000.
Previously, the U.N. was cross-referencing estimates from up to six different sources, ranging from the Syrian government to local and international non-governmental organizations.
“Effectively nothing is added by four of those groups, so you’re really down to just two, and we don’t think that’s strong enough to warrant any kind of report,” said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the U.N.’s human rights office in Geneva, according to Al Jazeera. “It risks misleading through effectively weaker sourcing, which is not to discourage either of the two groups still functioning, but the strength of pulling all these sources together has really dissipated.”
Keeping up with the death toll has been a major concern for international actors looking to help end the conflict or help the millions of refugees displaced by the war. Now that the U.N. is out of the loop on this key statistic, NGOs will have to rely on groups within Syria that may or may not be objective in keeping such counts accurate. In other words, if a Syrian human-rights group is openly anti-government, then its figures will be difficult to verify.
And if media organizations or diplomatic representatives are told higher figures than what another group maintains, news outlets or international government officials may tend to gravitate to the highest number floating around, potentially misleading the world on what are the facts.
For instance, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said this month on its website that the death toll is 130,000 but could be as high as 200,000.
Meanwhile, an end to the conflict is nowhere in sight. The U.S. said recently it would welcome the help of Iran, who is seen as a major influence on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Additionally, Syria’s government said on Wednesday that rebels staged assaults on two weapons storage sites containing deadly chemical components that Assad had pledged to destroy. It was the first time Syrian officials reported such attacks since an international effort began to clear the country of the chemical weapons, according to various reports.