GENEVA—Reporting “new levels of brutality” in Syria’s more than two-year-old conflict, United Nations investigators said on Tuesday they believed chemical weapons and thermobaric bombs were used in recent weeks and urged the international community to cut off supplies of weapons that could only result in more civilian casualties.
“Syria is in free fall,” Paulo Pinheiro, the chairman of the Commission of Inquiry investigating the hostilities in Syria told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. “Crimes that shock the conscience have become a daily reality. Humanity has been the casualty of this war.”
The four-member panel commission said its report to the council “documents for the first time the systematic imposition of sieges, the use of chemical agents and forcible displacement.”
“War crimes, crimes against humanity and gross human rights violations continue apace,” it added, reporting 17 incidents that could be called massacres between mid-January and mid-May.
The findings played directly into the increasingly divisive debate in Europe and the United States about the possibility of supplying weapons to the rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad after more than two years of strife that have turned into a full-blown civil war in which an estimated 80,000 people have died.
Last month, Britain and France pressed their partners in the European Union to allow an embargo on arms supplies to Syria to lapse, potentially allowing European governments to arm the rebels they support politically and diplomatically. At the same time, Moscow has said it will supply government forces with advanced ground-to-air missiles.
The findings seemed to take tacit aim at the Russian decision while reinforcing arguments made by European opponents of weapons supplies.
President Vladimir V. Putin, speaking at a televised news conference at the European Union-Russia summit in Yekaterinburg, said on Tuesday:
“I will remind you that Russian deliveries of weapons to Syria are completed on the basis of transparent, internationally recognized contracts. They do not violate any international regulations. And they are carried out strictly in the bounds of international law. With regard to the S-300, it is indeed one of the best antiaircraft complexes in the world, if not the best. It is a serious weapon, of course. We don’t want to disturb the balance in the region. The contract was signed several years ago. For the time being it has not been fulfilled.”
The panel cited increasing use of indiscriminate weapons, including cluster munitions, barrel bombs and surface-to-surface missiles as evidence of the “flagrant disregard” of government forces for the distinction between combatants and civilians demanded by international law. “There is a strong element of retribution in the government’s approach, with civilians paying a price for “allowing” armed groups to operate within their towns,” the report said.
Both sides had adopted siege tactics, trapping civilians in their homes and cutting off supplies of food, water, medicines and electricity, the report stated, in clear breach of international law. The panel also reported instances in which forces of both sides have used attacks or the threat of them to drive civilians out of particular areas, which is also a war crime.
Graphic description of the toll on civilians caught in the weeks-old siege of Qusayr in western Syria by government forces starkly illustrated the panel’s findings, with reports of women and children living in bunkers and foxholes to escape artillery and aerial bombardment. “We couldn’t leave the hole for a week. We ate the little food we had brought with us. My children were crying constantly,” a woman who managed to escape to Lebanon told the United Nations Refugee Agency.
“You leave and you risk being killed by a bomb or you stay and face a certainty of being killed,” the agency said another woman told its staff.
The conflict “is becoming more horrific every day,” Mr. Pinheiro said.
After more than two years of conflict, it was clear a military stalemate now prevailed. “It’s an illusion that more weapons will tip the balance between the two parties. No one is winning,” Mr. Pinheiro said. The report warned that “increased arm transfers hurt the prospect of a political settlement to the conflict, fuel the multiplication of armed actors at the national and regional levels and have devastating consequences for civilians.”
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