3,000 people killed in September in Syria

More than 3,000 people, including nearly 1,000 civilians, have been killed during the past month of foreign-sponsored militancy in Syria, making September the deadliest so far in the year, a report says.

According to a report published by the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday, 955 civilians, including 207 children, had lost their lives largely by militancy or bombardment conducted by warplanes of the US-led military coalition since the beginning of September.

The so-called coalition of 68 countries has been carrying out airstrikes against what are said to be targets belonging to the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group inside the Arab country since September 2014 without any authorization, whatsoever, from the Damascus government or a UN mandate. The military alliance has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of fulfilling its declared aim of destroying Daesh.

Earlier this year, the observatory said in a report that a total of 42,234 documented airstrikes in the country had resulted in a minimum estimate of some 7,000 civilian deaths by the US-led coalition between 2014 and 2017.

The UK-based monitoring group said in its Sunday report that the toll also included 790 government troops and popular defense groups, 738 terrorists from Daesh and the Takfiri Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham groups, and 550 members of the armed opposition groups and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed group of Kurdish and Arab forces.

The report added that the number of people killed in September was higher due to increased fighting and “intensified” aerial aggression of the US-led coalition in the north and east of Syria.

On September 12, the Russian military announced that the Syrian government had managed to liberate 85 percent of the country from the grips of terrorist groups, some two years after Moscow began a counterterrorism campaign in Syria at the official request of Damascus.

Syria has been fighting different foreign-sponsored militant and terrorist groups since March 2011. UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimated in August last year that more than 400,000 people had been killed in the crisis until then.