With the end of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the task of tallying the cost in human lives of a nearly 14-year-long civil war is continuing. Death toll estimates from the conflict are as high as 620,000, a staggering number in a country with a prewar population of 22 million.

Experts say establishing the true scale of death is complicated, as estimates are drawn from different sources and methods and calculated in varying ways. Here’s what we know:

What is the latest death toll?
As of March, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had documented the names of 507,567 people who had died in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict in March 2011.

The independent Syrian-run organization, which is based in Britain and collates information from multiple sources, said that it had verified another 110,343 deaths of people who were not named, bringing the total of civilians and combatants killed throughout the war to 617,910.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, another independent human rights organization that has been tracking the toll since the start of the conflict, had counted a total of 231,495 civilian deaths through June.
What does the United Nations say?
The Office of the U.N.

High Commissioner for Human Rights last released an accounting in 2021, when it estimated that at least 580,000 people had been killed to that point, including 350,209 “identified individuals.” The U.N. human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, cautioned at the time that the figure was “not a complete number of conflict-related killings” but that it indicated a “minimum verifiable number, and is certainly an undercount of the actual number.”