Confirmed death toll in Syrian conflict nearly 93,000, says UN A Free Syrian Army fighter works on the grave of a fallen colleague in Deir al-Zor. Syria's conflict has now claimed nearly 93,000 lives, the UN human rights commission has said, but it warned that the true deathtoll after 27 months of violence is likely to be even higher. The figure of 92,901 was reached at the end of April, with an average of over 5,000 people being killed every month since July last year. Other killings, however, may be undocumented. "This extremely high rate of killings, month after month, reflects the drastically deteriorating pattern of the conflict over the past year," Navi Pillay, the UN's high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement in Geneva. The latest casualty statistics are published against a background of urgent international efforts to convene peace talks between Bashar al-Assad's government and rebels seeking to overthrow him - as well as intensifying discussion in the west about supplying weapons to opposition fighters if negotiations fail. The previous UN figure, which was issued in mid-May, was that 80,000 people had been killed in the conflict, which began with peaceful and initially localised protests against the Assad regime in March 2011 and turned into a countrywide armed rebellion a few months later. The latest analysis is based on data from eight sources, including the Syrian government and the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Killings were only included if the name of the victim and date and location of death were known. "The status of the victims as combatants or non-combatants is unknown for all but a few records," says the report by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. This report finds that when the fully identified records were combined and duplicates identified, the eight databases collected here identified 92,901 unique killings. The enumeration is likely undercounting the true total number of conflict-related killings that have occurred during this time period. This is because an unknown number of conflict-related killings are likely to have occurred without being documented anywhere. Pillay added: "There are also well-documented cases of individual children being tortured and executed, and entire families, including babies, being massacred - which, along with this devastatingly high death toll, is a terrible reminder of just how vicious this conflict has become." Meanwhile in Syria, activists say rebels have gained control of a key military base in the central Hama province. The base is on the northern edge of the town of Morek, which straddles the country's strategic north-south highway leading to the province of Aleppo. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the rebels seized the base after intense clashes with regime forces on Thursday. It said the rebels killed six government troops and seized weapons and ammunition. A video posted on Facebook shows flames rising from the burning compound and the bodies of some of the killed fighters. President Bashar Assad's forces are waging an offensive to drive rebels out of the central provinces of Hama and Homs, and the northern Aleppo province.