The United Nations no longer will report on how many people have been killed in the raging Syrian civil war because it says it no longer has enough sources in the field for reliable information.
The last official count by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights was around 100,000, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said that the verified figure is 130,000 but could be as high as 200,000. The United Nations say it could confirm or deny the estimate.
The number has risen by a few hundred or more the past week because of as a second war, pitting opposition forces against Al Qaeda terrorists, whom rebels accused of abuses, although the number of fighters in the war who have not committed abuses is somewhere around zero.
kidnappings, torture, assassinations and public executions have become routine practice by forces loyal to Syrian President Bassar al-Assad and by the opposition.
A security official in Damascus, referring to rebels and the Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant told AFP that, “nothing unites them except terrorism.”
And there is nothing that could unite all parties in the war – including jihadists and Assad – except Israel.