The Ferociously Fractious Middle East

"He'd visit a detention facility every single day and would interrogate, that means flogging even of children, to obtain confessions and as a punishment. Trials usually take up to three minutes, maximum."
Cilina Nasser researcher, Rule of Fear report

"The emir of Al-Raqqa came in and sat down. He called out the name of a man, called Fadhel. He stood up. The interrogator said to the emir, 'This is the PKC guy' (in Syria this refers to the Soviet Union-made Kalashnikov machine guns). The emir said: 'You are fighting the Islamic state. Take him away to qisas [retribution], make his head fly'. A jailer immediately tied him up and took him away."
Former Al-Raqqa detainee

"In the areas they control, ISIS forces have committed numerous serious rights abuses, including some that amount to war crimes. They include abductions, arbitrary detention, torture and other ill-treatment, and unlawful killings."
"Those abducted and detained by ISIS include children as young as eight who are held together with adults in the same cruel and inhuman conditions."
Phillip Luther, Amnesty director, Middle East and North Africa

In Syria, parts of its largest, once most-populous city now held by rebel forces, are being bombarded by what is called "barrel bombs". It seems they're a kind of bomb equivalent to cluster bombs; a very similar effect. The rebels call them "blood bombs" to express the carnage they're responsible for. These bombs have been seen to land deliberately around schools and around bread lines, the military aiming for vulnerable civilians.

The idea is to encourage them to either evacuate the areas, or to turn against the rebel forces that have taken control of the areas, so they can be returned to government control. The Alawite regime is unconcerned over the fate of men, women and children who simply would like to be able to endure the unendurable, and to secure their lives and that of their families. In and of itself an adequate explanation for the millions of displaced people in Syria.

This regime initially responded to the protests by Sunni Syrians agitating for equal treatment by the Shia regime years ago, by arresting, torturing and killing schoolchildren who dared write anti-government slogans on their school walls. The number of civilians, including women and children who have somehow disappeared, just simply vanished and never heard from again, represents a matter of great anguish to Syrians.

It appears that the Al-Qaeda affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has taken inspiration from the actions of the government authority. While they have no chemical weapons at their disposal to emulate the regime's use of those weapons of mass destruction on civilians through a series of chemicals-packed bombs lobbed into crowded civilian areas during the night and taking over one thousand lives in the process, they have been opening prisons of their own.

These are held to be secret prisons established throughout Syria, a reflection of what Amnesty International refers to as "cruel, capricious and arbitrary rule", where ISIS forces hold sway. A UN panel has revealed through a recently released report that it discovered the existence of "a consistent country-wide pattern" of Syrian security, armed forces and pro-government militias capturing people in mass arrests, house searches, at hospitals or checkpoints. And then, pouf! they no longer exist.

Effectively reducing the pool of potential problems through militias recruitment by seizing and 'disappearing' young Syrian men. Amnesty's report, Rule of Fear, reflected on one Islamist judge who appears at trials, intimidatingly equipped with an explosives belt, and prepared to issue death sentences in hearings of several minutes' duration. This is swift justice.

"Torture and abuse of prisoners are rife on the part of all factions in Syria, but ISIS has particular reason to engage in such practices because of their belief in the necessity of applying harsh hudud punishments [Islamic law penalties] for various alleged misdeeds", explained Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum think tank.

This benighted mindset seems a specialty of the Middle East, its yeast Islam and its reliably rising force tribal and sectarian hatred. While Syrians are being slaughtered by their own government and desperately flee to safety over the border in Iraq, Jordan and Turkey, in Baghdad suicide bombings by Sunni jihadists target Shiite pilgrims, killing dozens daily.

And its neighbour, Iran in the Shia quartet including Syria, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon's Hezbollah, rejects accusations brought against it for serious rights violations, including torture and the "alarming" rate at which the death penalty is used as a handy corrective to intransigence against Islamist-approved behaviours, by the UN General Assembly.