Syria in Bad Odour at the UN ... Temporarily

"The overall scale of the violations continues to increase regardless of the parties perpetrating them."
"This paralysis [the UN Security Council failure to act] is responsible for acute harm to victims of this war."
"Government forces continued to perpetrate massacres and conduct wide-spread attacks on civilians, systematically committing murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearance."
"Executions in public spaces have become a common spectacle on Fridays [in the regions of Raqqah and Aleppo, controlled by ISIS]."
"[Government intelligence agencies have subjected] tens of thousands of victims to unimaginable suffering."
Paulo Pinheiro, UN panel on Syria

The UNRWA team resumed distribution in Yarmouk camp on 16 and 17 July after a break of two days. Food parcels, hygiene kits, vitamin packs, rehydration salts and various other food items were distributed to hundreds of families.   Photo: UNRWA Archives

The United Nations panel consisting of four investigators, has now produced its eighth report since its inauguration three years earlier. Drawing on testimony it had collected in the six months ending in July, the report lists public executions and often beheadings becoming a "common spectacle" in parts of Syria that are controlled by Islamic militants. While government forces continue their massacre and torture of civilians.

The civil war has evolved over its three-year period of active and atrocious conflict, into multiple, shifting conflicts whose principals are numberless armed groups where those militias vie with government forces and jihadists seemingly for which could conceive of and commit the most outrageous crimes against humanity, according to this report. After Friday mosque services, it seems the faithful are inspired to even greater efforts on behalf of jihad.

While government forces, with the assistance of the terrorist Shiite Lebanon-based group Hezbollah had made significance advances against the multi-tiered rebel groups in retaking strategic areas, the most remarkable result of the ongoing conflict was the gathering power and influence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, a group the regime had nurtured because of its offensives against the other rebel and Islamist groups.

The advance by ISIS into Iraq, and its lightning-strike on Mosul when it captured the city and with it all the munitions and military equipment left behind by the panic-stricken Iraqi military forces barracked there, and its ransacking and looting of the Mosul bank helped ISIS immeasurably to advance its relentless route to capturing more geography and influencing Muslims to join their jihadist success toward a caliphate.

The government attacked opposition forces on all fronts with the use of heavy air and artillery bombardments striking civilian areas such as markets, shops, hospitals, schools and other places where civilians gather with the abandon of careless disregard for their welfare, rather than focusing on hitting the military capacities of their armed enemy groups. The UN panel was rather less than impressed with this dishonourable conduct.

Even while Syria was completing the process of disposing of its chemical weapons, the panel found evidence of government helicopters using chlorine gas in barrel bomb attacks in Idlib and Hama on its own civilians. Not covered by the chemical weapons convention the use of any chemical agent for military purposes represents a war crime. Syria is guilty as charged, even while itself charging its innocence, mistakenly blamed for what the 'terrorists' among the rebels are doing.

Armed Shiite Alawite militias aiding, but not part of the Syrian military, were also found to have committed massacres in their attacks on civilians through indiscriminate artillery firing, their conduct of summary executions and torture, their taking of hostages and targeting medical and religious personnel and journalists. Dozens of documented beheadings were cited, with ISIS encouraging residents to witness them. Including victim's bodies affixed to crucifixes.

Adult men accused of affiliation with other armed groups, or violating an ISIS criminal ode represented most of the victims, but five people under 18 and two women were stoned to death as well. Government-held detainees were documented as having faced torture and cruel treatment, along with those captured by armed opposition groups. It is instructive for the Western onlooker to recall that this is Muslim-upon-Muslim slaughter of the most heinous brutality. Reflective of its self-image as a religion of peace and tolerance.

Receiving special attention as "the most disturbing developments" was the creation of large ISIS camps meant to train children, mostly boys in the 14-year-old range, and some as young as ten, for armed conflict. ISIS does have that in common, in actual fact, with their brethren in terror, Hamas, which has also for many years, conducted such summer training camps where young Palestinians living in Gaza have been indoctrinated into warfare techniques against the "Zionists".

Mr. Pinheiro even made reference to the potential of the United States' administration-authorized surveillance and strike flights over Iraq and possibly Syria: "I think the United States must respect the laws of war and we are concerned about the presence of these children." Now that's one for the war chronicles; equipping all warplanes with sights so accurate that those below can be identified as youth or men, and refraining accordingly.

Somewhat familiar with what Israel, fighting for its very existence and the lives of its people, faces with Hamas firing off rockets from within crowded civilian enclaves, gleefully inviting artillery response from the IDF which as any military is geared to do, fires back at the source of the rocket launch, a predilection that Hamas uses to great and useful slander effect within the international community eager to find yet another reason to fault Israel for refusing to be a victim.

As for the Syrian government versus ISIS; the latter will be persona non grata at the United Nations [unlike the terrorist group Palestine Liberation Organization under the cunning dove-holding, gun-wielding Yasser Arafat], while Syria will be forgiven and welcomed back to the United Nations with open arms to take its rightful place among the other like nations in the Muslim League.