Syria deaths 60,000; rebels besiege airports

Insurgents besieged troops on the perimeter of the international airport in Aleppo, the hard fought-over main city of Syria's north, and a military airbase in Idlib province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Aleppo's critical civilian transportation hub has been closed since Tuesday after repeated attacks by rebels, according to an airport official, who said it would reopen as soon as the army regained control of the surrounding areas.

Rebels holding much of the area surrounding Aleppo were targeted by regime shelling overnight in the city's Sakhur district and in the towns of Marea and Aazaz farther north near the Turkish border.

Meanwhile, hundreds of fighters with two hard-core Islamist rebel groups, the Al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, fought soldiers around the Taftanaz airbase in the northwest province of Idlib, the British-based Observatory said, adding that airstrikes were blasting rebel positions.

The rebels had remotely detonated a bomb at one of the airport's gates the day before but were pushed back by the army, according to both the Observatory and a military source inside the base.

The military source told AFP that clashes outside the base had been nonstop for over 48 hours and there had been a large number of rebel casualties.

Three rebels were meanwhile killed in combat with troops around the Deir Ezzor military airport, as fighting also broke out in the nearby provincial capital in the east of the country.

Near Damascus, warplanes carried out airstrikes and ground troops launched rockets on the southwest towns of Daraya and Moadamiyet al-Sham in fresh attempts to wrest back control.

In the town of Mleha, just east of Damascus, bodies were being recovered from a service station hit by a regime airstrike on Wednesday.

The Observatory said 219 people died on Wednesday nationwide: 115 civilians, 57 rebels and 47 soldiers.

'Shocking' Death Toll

The overall death toll of the 21-month Syrian conflict has unsettled observers.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Wednesday called it “truly shocking” as she revealed a vetted U.N. tally nearly a third higher than that previously compiled by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“The number of casualties is much higher than we expected, and is truly shocking,” she said in a statement.

“Given there has been no let-up in the conflict since the end of November, we can assume that more than 60,000 people have been killed by the beginning of 2013,” Pillay said.

The average number of deaths recorded in recent months was five times that registered mid-2011, reflecting intensifying viciousness and the regime use of airstrikes.

Pillay said in her statement that “this massive loss of life could have been avoided” if the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad had not chosen the “ruthless suppression” of what initially were peaceful protests.

Assad is resisting pressure from the rebels and from much of the international community to step down.

Karim Bitar, an analyst at the Paris-based Institute for International and Strategic Relations, was skeptical the new U.N. toll would have a political impact.

“The world has become unfortunately so toughened to these figures, sort of anaesthetized. There is this terrible Stalin quote: 'One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic,'” Bitar said.

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