The Assad regime and militants from the Islamic State (formerly ISIS) have been accused of committing “mass atrocities” in Syria, in a report by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC).
The report, based on hundreds of interviews over the first six months of 2014, describes a bleak situation after three years of civil war where both sides are committing war crimes against civilians populations trapped in the conflict.
The Assad regime is accused of bombarding civilians areas, including hospitals, and using chemical weapons in its continued battle to maintain a stranglehold on power. The report states:
“Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of murder, hostage-taking, torture, rape and sexual violence, recruiting and using children in hostilities and targeting civilians. Government forces disregarded the special protection accorded to hospitals and medical and humanitarian personnel. Indiscriminate and disproportionate aerial bombardment and shelling led to mass civilian casualties and spread terror. Government forces used chlorine gas, an illegal weapon.”
The report describes eight separate occasions in which the Assad regime is believed to have used chemical weapons, suspected to be chlorine gas, a “red line” set out by US President Barack Obama for US intervention in 2013.
The opposition are blamed for similar crimes, with the Islamic State singled out for its particular barbarism, as the report says:
“Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) committed torture, murder, acts tantamount to enforced disappearance, and forcible displacement as part of an attack on the civilian population in Aleppo and Ar Raqqah governorates, amounting to crimes against humanity.”
One of the investigators, Carla del Ponte, a former chief prosecutor of two UN war crimes tribunals, has urged world powers to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court.
Some 200,000 people have died in the three year conflict in Syria, which began in 2011 after President Bashar al-Assad brutally put down a peaceful protest for democratic reforms as the Arab Spring swept much of the region.
