The Agony of Syria

The Agony of Syria by Max Rodenbeck | The New York Review of Books: Statistics have consistently failed to capture the scale of Syria’s tragedy. The widely cited current death toll of around 20,000 may not seem large by the standards of modern conflict. Yet this is a conservative estimate of numbers that are accelerating very fast, with more people killed in July alone than in all of 2011. Tens of thousands more Syrians have been injured, while even larger numbers have suffered while under arrest. For many if not most, this has meant often shockingly extreme forms of torture in a detention system whose systematic cruelty has been extensively documented.