SYRIA: GOVERNMENT AND ISIS COMMITTING WAR CRIMES, SAYS UN

August 27, 2014: in a 45-page report issued in Geneva, UN investigators said the Syrian government and Islamic State (ISIS) insurgents were both committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The report said that ISIS forces in northern Syria were waging a campaign to instil fear, including public executions, amputations, lashings and mock crucifixions in public squares as residents, including children, are forced to watch.
“Executions in public spaces have become a common spectacle on Fridays in [Isis power-base] Raqqa and in ISIS-controlled areas of Aleppo governorate,” said the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the human rights situation in Syria, which was created in 2011 by the UN Human Rights Council.
The group “seeks to destroy and remould humanity in its image, wreaking havoc on civilians, minorities and the basic freedoms of women and children,” commission head Paulo Pinheiro told reporters in Geneva. He described how bodies of those killed were placed on public display, “creating an atmosphere of fear and terror.”
Pinheiro emphasised, though, that ISIS “does not have the monopoly of brutality in the Syrian conflict.”
In their report, covering the period from 20 January to 15 July, Pinheiro and his colleagues also detailed a wide range of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Syrian government. Deaths in custody in Syrian jails were on the rise and forensic analysis of 26,948 photographs allegedly taken from 2011-2013 in government detention centres support its “longstanding findings of systematic torture and deaths of detainees,” they said. They insisted that the only way to move towards an end of the conflict was for the UN’s deadlocked Security Council to refer the Syrian crimes to the International Criminal Court. (Sources: AFP/Guardian, 28/08/2014)