Although the atrocities committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have gotten much of the attention in recent weeks, investigators from the United Nations today presented their report documenting that most of the violence against non-combatants in Syria has been perpetrated by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Despite the extremes of violence committed by Islamic militants, [UN official Paulo Sergio] Pinheiro said, the Syrian government “remains responsible for the majority of the civilian casualties, killing and maiming scores of civilians daily,” describing killing “from a distance” by shelling and aerial bombardment and “up close at checkpoints and in its interrogation rooms.”
Among the dozen statements from witnesses selected by the panel were accounts of families torn apart by shelling and former prisoners describing their torture in government detention centers and deaths of cellmates from injuries sustained during interrogation, insufficient medical care and lack of air in densely packed cells. A prisoner held in a military jail reported that severely malnourished patients had been chained, naked, two or four to a bed, without sufficient medical attention and that they were subjected to torture.
In July, the documented atrocities committed by the Assad regime prompted a State Department official to denounce the “kind of machinery of cruel death that we haven’t seen frankly since the Nazis.” In August, at a press conference, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel asserted that the Assad regime was “a central part of the problem” and that there was no possibility that the United States would cooperation with it to fight ISIS.
Brooklyn Middleton wrote in Yes, We Really Can Stop the Slaughter in Syria, which was published in the March 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, that there was a strategic reason for ending the violence on both sides of the civil war:
Allowing Syria to continue in the political purgatory it has remained in for three years allows jihadi groups to continue flourishing. The assertion that both the Iran-backed Assad regime and radical Islamist factions should continue battling each other is as myopic as it is bereft of humanity: as the conflict rages on, with potentially hundreds of thousands more being killed and potentially spiraling into a full-blown genocide, both sides will benefit from increased resources, foreign fighters, and battle experience, while the spillover will continue to seep into neighboring countries with increasingly deadly repercussions, to the point where the strategic interests of the U.S. and its allies will inevitably be directly threatened—and both sides will feel emboldened by the manifest weakness of the West.
[Photo: AFP News Agency / YouTube ]