Syria's Hideous Agony

"The harrowing violence in the Syrian Arab Republic has entered its fourth year, with no signs of abating. The lives of over one hundred thousand people have been extinguished. Thousands have been the victims of torture. The indiscriminate and disproportionate shelling and aerial bombardment of civilian-inhabited areas has intensified in the last six months, as has the use of suicide and car bombs. Civilians in besieged areas have been reduced to scavenging. In this conflict's most recent low, people, including young children, have starved to death."
United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry

GRAPHIC CONTENT The bodies of two Syrian children lie in the rubble of a residential building reportedly hit by an explosives-filled barrel dropped by a government forces helicopter on March 18, 2014. AFP PHOTO/KHALED KHATIB (Photo credit should read KHALED KHATIB/AFP/Getty Images)

Syrian men as well as Syrian women know the degradation and spiritual emptiness of having suffered sex assaults and violence. "In Adra Central Prison, Damascus, pregnant detainees are suffering miscarriages, premature births and deaths of newborns as a result of unsanitary conditions and denial of medical treatment. There is a climate of impunity and women have been punished after making complaints."

"In late 2013 government forces invaded Wadi el-Mawla near Talkalakh, Homs, looking for named men. Later, they returned to the family homes of the men and killed their wives and children." This is the Syrian regime's civilized manner of reasserting law and order, of convincing their majority Sunni population that they are equal under the law of Syria to the minority Shia Alawite population represented by the Alawite Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

"Since 20 January 2014, the government has ramped up its campaign of dropping barrel bombs into residential neighbourhoods of Aleppo city, with devastating consequences for civilians." Those are the crude devices shoved out of helicopters that explode with tons of shrapnel, capable of destroying anything like a small building, homes, and amputating limbs of those within, decapitating men, women or children, shredding their skins, deboning their bodies.

This is a particularly effective way to convince Syrian civilians that they may be backing the wrong side, the Syrian Sunni rebels whose original campaign was a hopeful protest against the regime's oppression of the majority population, which the government swiftly sought to tamp down by arresting, torturing and killing protesters, including children. The backlash to that response was the militarization of the rebels.

"Bodies were torn apart by shrapnel and flying debris. Survivors commonly spoke about seeing bodies without limbs or heads." ... "Up to a million children are estimated to be living under siege or in areas without humanitarian assistance in Syria." The majority of children evacuated from Yarmouk were in advanced stages of malnourishment called starvation, but not yet succumbed as did those children who did die there from lack of food and medicine.

Khaled Khatib/AFP    A Syrian man evacuates a child found in the rubble of a building hit 
by an explosives-filled barrel dropped by a government forces helicopter in Aleppo. 

"The impact of the Syrian war falls heavily on its youngest victims. The testimony of mothers and children themselves demonstrates the psychological trauma that has resulted from witnessing violent events, including the death of relatives and friends. Children are displaying signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as insomnia and aggression."

People hung from ceilings and walls in government institutions, beaten with electrical cables and subjected to psychological torture. "One female detainee was locked in a room with dead bodies for three days." Torture, the report pointed out, was not restricted to the military, it also came at the hands of the rebels as one man described being "crucified" by rebels tying his hands and feet to a wooden cross, then lashing and beating him.

"Persons held in [ISIS] detention, both civilians and hors de combat fighters were killed on 'execution fields'." ISIS of course refers to 'fighters' from the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, associated with Al-Qaeda, despite something akin to excommunication earlier asserted ... and oddly enough ISIS appears to have made a cozy little arrangement in league with the Syrian regime; it is merely emulating the regime's tactics.

"Non-State armed groups have increasingly resorted to suicide bombings and the use of improvised explosive devices. On 9 January, 14 schoolchildren were killed outside their school by an ISIS suicide car bomb in Al-Kafat, Hama"; the regime using ISIS suicide bombers to spread terror among civilians.

And the solution to vicious Islamist dysfunction is .... ?