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Nearly 5,000 people have been killed in Syria's escalating civil war in the month of August, activists groups have claimed. This is the highest figure ever reported in over 17 months of fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. "The past month witnessed large massacres and the regime was conducting wide operations to try to crush the uprising," the New York Post quoted Omar Idilbi, a Cairo-based activist with the Local Coordination Committees (LCC) group, as saying. "Last month's acts of violence were unprecedented," Idilbi added. According to the paper, the U.N. children's fund UNICEF put the death toll for last week alone at 1,600, the largest weekly figure for the entire uprising. The Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that 5,440 people, including 4,114 civilians were killed in August. According to the report, the LCC put the toll at 4,933 civilians. The two main activists groups also released new death tolls for the entire uprising since March 2011. The Observatory said over 26,000 have been killed, including more than 18,500 civilians. The LCC put the death toll at more than 23,000 civilians. According to the paper, Syria's uprising has been the bloodiest in the Arab Spring that has already removed long-serving authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya.

5,000 killed in Syria in 'bloodiest ever month' August, say activists