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People
Cultural Demography
Most Syrians are of Semitic ethnic ancestry. Arabs make up around 90 percent of the population, and Arabic is the official and predominant language. Kurds, Armenians and Turkomans, among others, comprise the rest of the Syrian population.
English and French are frequently spoken by the educated segments of the citizenry.
Islam is the chief religion among the Arab population in Syria. Although Sunni Muslims are prevalent, Shiites, Alawis and Druze are also represented. The majority of the non-Arabic population, including Kurds, Armenians and Turkomans, belongs to various Christian churches. The once thriving Jewish community in Damascus is today reduced to about 1,000 people.
Human Development
In terms of health and welfare, Syria's infant mortality rate is 26.78 deaths per 1,000 live births. Life expectancy at birth for the total population is 70.9 years of age -- 69.53 years of age for males, and 72.35 years of age for females. The estimated population growth in recent years is 2.45 percent and the total fertility rate is 3.78 children per woman.
The rate of literacy for the total population is 79.6 percent, but this average is not gender balanced. The literacy rate for men is 86 percent - a significantly higher rate than the 73.6 percent rate for women.
Access to water and sanitation is generally good in Syria.
A notable measure of human development is the Human Development Index (HDI), which is formulated by the United Nations Development Program. The HDI is a composite of several indicators, which measure a country's achievements in three main arenas of human development: longevity, knowledge and education, as well as economic standard of living. The HDI places Syria in the medium human development category, at 111th place in a recent ranking of 169 countries. Although the concept of human development is complicated and cannot be properly captured by values and indices, the HDI, which is calculated and updated annually, offers a wide-ranging assessment of human development in certain countries, not based solely upon traditional economic and financial indicators.
Editor's Note on Humanitarian Crisis:
Since early 2011, anti-government protests have spread and escalated across the Arab world; Syria emerged as an addition to the list of countries experiencing unrest in March 2011. At first, protesters stopped short of demanding the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad, instead demanding greater political freedom and efforts to end corruption. For his part, President Assad announced he would advance a reform agenda, which would include lifting the emergency laws that had been in place for decades, and increased rights to the country's disenfranchised Kurdish population. These moves were aimed at quelling the rising climate of unrest gripping the country. But over time, as protests continued, and as the Assad regime carried out a hard line crackdown on dissent, tensions escalated between the government and the protesters.
In mid-2011, the United Nations Security Council and the Arab League respectively issued condemnations of the violence in Syria. As well, the United Nations Human Rights Council called for an independent inquiry into the violent crackdown on dissent. Meanwhile, global leaders were calling for President Assad to step down from power, given the brutality of the Syrian regime's crackdown on protesters. As of 2012, the bloody crackdown by the Assad regime on anti-government protesters was ongoing. In fact, the crackdown appeared to become more relentless in places such as Homs and Aleppo. Despite widespread condemnation from the West, a United Nations Security Resolution on the situation in Syria was subject to veto by Russia and China. A subsequent vote in the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned Syria for its brutal crackdown. A prevailing truce, brokered by the joint United Nations/Arab League envoy, Kofi Annan, was established in the interests of preventing further bloodshed; however, it was revealed to be an exercise in theory rather than practice and eventually the United Nations monitoring mission ended in failure.
Syria has, meanwhile, been subject to sanctions by various countries and was sliding into pariah status in the international community. Assassinations, alleged massacres, geopolitical tensions with Turkey and Israel, and most recently, suspicions about the use of chemical weapons, have since mired the Syrian landscape. Indeed, it was increasingly clear that Syria had slipped into a state of civil war and was facing a devastating humanitarian crisis. That crisis reached new heights in August 2013 with claims that Syrian forces launched a chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus. Was this the clear sign that United States President Barack Obama's "red line" had definitively been crossed? And would the international community become more involved in the Syrian crisis? Would the September 2013 chemical weapons deal with Syria between the United States and Russia quiet the war drums? Would Syria actually abide by its international obligations set forth in that agreement? The answers to those questions were yet to be determined. In the meanwhile, the highly anticipated peace summit in Geneva ended without yielding any productive results.
Even as the global community remained ensconced in the ongoing debate on how to end the violence and bloodshed in Syria (occuring since 2011), human rights groups were accumulating the evidence against the Assad regime on the matter of human rights violations and abuses. To this end, a report issued by Amnesty International included the accusation that the Syrian regime was using torture and other forms of ill-treatment against detainees in that country at unprecedented levels. The report, which was titled, "I Wanted to Die: Syria's Torture Victims Speak Out," documented 31 methods of torture and other abusive tactics -- including gender-based torture, sexual violence, and electric shock -- which Amnesty International said were used by Syrian security forces against detainees. Amnesty International's Ann Harrison said, "Testimonies we have heard give disturbing insights into a system of detention and interrogation which appears intended primarily to humiliate and terrify its victims into silence." Harrison went on to note that the scale of torture and abuse was at a level not seen since the 1970s and 1980s, when Hafez Assad ruled Syria.
In a separate but related development, Human Rights Watch reported that Syrian troops were laying down land mines near the borders with Turkey and Lebanon. It should be noted that these border regions have recently become escape paths for Syrians trying to flee the bloodshed. Thus, the planting of land mines in such areas could possibly be interpreted as the Syrian government's desire to punish civilians for trying to escape. Massacres and extra-judicial executions by government forces and rebels respectively, in addition to the allegations in 2013 of the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, only accentuate the climate of human rights abuse plaguing conflict-ridden Syria.
Since the conflict between anti-government protesters and the Assad regime broke out at the start of 2011, the number of people who have perished in Syria was reported to be a shocking 60,000, according to a study released by the United Nations at the start of 2013. Note that the death toll was later increased to 70,000, and again revised to 93,000 in June 2013. Note that at the close of July 2013, the death toll since the start of the war in Syria stood at 100,000.
In August 2013, the United Nations' refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as well as the United Nations' children's fund, United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), confirmed that as many as two million children in Syria were displaced as a result of the civil war plaguing the country. Adding to the cache of disturbing statistics was the finding that children constituted half of all refugees (separate from the internally displaced persons) fleeing Syria, with a full 75 percent of those children being under the age of 11. Antonio Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said: "The youth of Syria are losing their homes, their family members, and their futures."
By the start of September 2013, the number of Syrian refugees (separate from the millions internally displaced) increased by a full one million people in only a space of six months, with the number of Syrian refugees now exceeding two million. In a statement, the United Nations refugee agency declared: "Syria is hemorrhaging women, children, and men who cross borders often with little more than the clothes on their backs." The millions of Syrians forced to flee the country as refugees, in combination with the millions internally displaced within the country as a result of the war, compelled the United Nations refugee agency to admit that one-third of Syria's entire population was being affected by the civil war. As noted by the UNHCR head, Guterres: "It clearly demonstrates that we are witnessing a conflict in constant escalation."
United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay was on the record characterizing the bloodshed in Syria as "truly shocking." In 2013, the fact of the matter was that in addition to the 100,000 dead since the start of the war in 2011, there were as many as millions of displaced persons within Syria due to the ravages of the war, with even more millions fleeing their homes for neighboring countries in order to escape the crossfire of violence. As well, more than 2.5 million Syrians were in need of humanitarian assistance with as many as one million Syrians going hungry due to the inability of aid agencies to deliver food, according to the World Food Program. As succinctly stated by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: "The status quo in Syria is indefensible."
Note: As of 2014, Syria had replaced Afghanistan as the source of the world's largest refugee population. As well, a the United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that war crimes had been committed on both sides of the Syrian civil war; the commission of inquiry blamed world powers for allowing the Syrian regime and the rebel movement to respectively function with impunity.
Written by Dr. Denise Youngblood Coleman, Editor in Chief, www.countrywatch.com . See Bibliography for list of general research sources.
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