Genocide In Syria: Unthinkable Atrocities Meted Out On Millions

“We are failing to save lives in Syria. We cannot look at Syria, and the evil that has arisen from the ashes of indecision, and think this is not the lowest point in the world’s inability to protect and defend the innocent. The government, armed and terrorist groups, continue to kill, maim, rape, torture and take Syria to new lows that seemed unimaginable a few years ago. We need the numbness to the senseless violence and the apparent apathy to end,” Angelina Jolie, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees special envoy, blasted the world powers in April and sharply criticized the U.N. Security Council for failing to help the millions of Syrian refugees and not working as one to end the conflict.

A team of UN investigators risked their lives to collect secret government documents that provide irrefutable evidence of systematic war crimes by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime. Their report, presented to the UN Human Rights Council in March, detailed a horrifying array of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Syrian regime, the Islamic State and other armed opposition groups.

The UNHCR estimates more than 3.8 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, and another 7.6 million Syrians are displaced inside the country. Some 220,000 Syrians have been killed since 2011, when peaceful protests erupted against Bashar but gradually developed into a bloody civil war.

Last year, a team of internationally renowned war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts – David Crane and Desmond de Silva, chief prosecutors of the war crimes tribunal for Sierra Leone, and Geoffrey Nice, lead prosecutor against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, found direct evidence of systematic torture and killing by Bashar’s regime including 55,000 horrific photographs documenting the death of more than 11,000 detainees killed in Syrian government custody.

“This is a smoking gun. Any prosecutor would like this kind of evidence – the photos and the process. This is direct evidence of the regime’s killing machine,” Crane told CNN. “The emaciated bodies were the product of starvation as a method of torture, “reminiscent of the pictures of those [who] were found still alive in the Nazi death camps after World War II,” Desmond de Silva added.

In its report released in May, Amnesty International called upon all parties to the Syrian conflict “to end deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects; to end the indiscriminate use of explosive weapons; to end arbitrary arrests, torture and other ill-treatment, and enforced disappearances; and to allow unimpeded humanitarian access”.

Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director, said in a statement, “Widespread atrocities, in particular the vicious and unrelenting aerial bombardment of civilian neighbourhoods by government forces, have made life for civilians in Aleppo [Syria’s commercial capital] increasingly unbearable. These reprehensible and continual strikes on residential areas point to a policy of deliberately and systematically targeting civilians in attacks that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. By relentlessly and deliberately targeting civilians, the Syrian government appears to have adopted a callous policy of collective punishment against the civilian population of Aleppo.”

The appalling reports and dreadful photos of genocide cry out for justice. Will the world take notice and hold the criminals accountable? It may be inconvenient, but important to bring the perpetrators of war crimes and genocide to justice – for strategic and moral reasons.
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