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The United Nations is shocked by the latest body count in the 21-month civil war in Syria. The UN says more than 60,000 people have been killed. There’s been a steady increase in the average number of documented deaths per month since the beginning of the conflict.
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BRENDAN TREMBATH: The United Nations is shocked by the latest body count in the 21-month civil war in Syria. The UN says more than 60,000 people have been killed.
There’s been a steady increase in the average number of documented deaths per month since the beginning of the conflict.
I spoke a short time ago to Middle East correspondent Matt Brown.
Matt Brown, how reliable are these figures?
MATT BROWN: Brendan, quite a lot of work’s been done on this five month study. The independent assessors used seven different sources. They include human rights organisations, opposition groups and a few, a relative few came from the government.
They only included instances where they had available to them the first and family name of the casualties as well as the date and the location where they were killed. So a reasonably thorough account.
However in some months, recent months for example where say 4,000 or 5,000 people were killed, half of the casualties came from only one of those sources and they did note that different groups are starting to use the same basic source as the source of their information.
That said, the statistical analysis that
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