Working undercover in the northern city of Aleppo
...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
, which has been pounded for weeks as
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Lord of the Baath...
's forces seek to overrun rebel bastions, Beres insists the corpse count in the Syrian conflict is higher than what is reported.
"At least 50,000 people have been killed without counting the disappeared," Beres, a French surgeon who daily patches up dozens of people in a hospital near the front lines of Aleppo, told Agence La Belle France Presse in an interview.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists on the ground across Syria, has given a latest toll of at least 26,283 people killed in Syria since the revolt began in March last year -- 18,695 civilians, 1,079 defectors and 6,509 troops.
But Beres said watchdogs such as the Britannia-based Observatory are unable to paint a full picture of the losses because many deaths are documented "only with ink and paper."
"I am sure that the dead that I have here are not tallied in London," said Beres.
In the past two weeks, he said, he has treated a daily average of 20 to 45 maimed people, the majority of them fighters with the opposition Free Syria Army, including "quite a few jihadists."
Fatalities in rebel ranks range between two and six each day, he said.
But those are just the figures collected in one small hospital within a massive commercial city which is now almost evenly divided between rebel and army-controlled areas.
Many gray zones lie between both camps and the security situation remains fluid: shops open and pedestrian traffic has resumed in some neighborhoods while tank shells and mortar hit others.