Assad’s Unending Atrocities

As the Syrian civil war enters its eighth year, President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies look like the winners — thanks to an endless series of atrocities. Will they ever be held to account?

The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has accumulated an “overwhelming volume” of testimony, images and videos documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity in the conflict. Other investigators, including a UN panel looking at the regime’s use of chemical weapons and a team led by former French judge Catherine Marchi-Uhel, have more evidence.

Assad’s forces aren’t the only butchers, but they’ve led the way from the start, when government troops began waging war on peaceful demonstrators back in the spring of 2011.

Regime tactics regularly include mass executions as well as rape (of both sexes), forced prostitution, sexual slavery and forced pregnancy, plus genital mutilation, torture and murder of prisoners in government detention centers.

Assad’s planes, with Russian help, have routinely bombed schools and hospitals — to the point where their opponents no longer mark medical facilities because it guarantees they’ll be targeted.

Assad also started using chemical weapons in the war’s first year; the 2013 deal that then-US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed “got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out” did no such thing. Among other failings, it exempted chlorine gas, which soon became a central regime weapon, along with “barrel bombs” and cluster munitions targeted at civilians.

Of the country’s 21 million people before the war, at least half a million are dead, 5 million have fled the country and millions more are internal refugees. ISIS rose and fell (Assad tacitly cooperated with it nearly the entire time), while other Islamists came to dominate the rest of the opposition because the West failed to aid pro-democracy rebels.

The Commission of Inquiry says its staff will never be “in a position to investigate each and every crime,” while the latest report by Marchi-Uhel’s team warns, “It is not possible to prosecute all of the crimes committed, given their vast number” — even if the United Nations grants jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court or some special Syria-only war-crimes tribunal.

If UNaction ever comes: To date, Russia has used its Security Council veto to shield Assad from any UN sanctions.