SYRIA | UN panel: Crimes against humanity committed

Fighters from the al-Qaida linked Islamic State group during a parade in Raqqa, Syria

The Syrian government has likely used chlorine gas to attack civilians while the Islamic State group has committed crimes against humanity with attacks on civilians in two provinces in the country, an independent U.N. commission said yesterday.
The report from the commission, which has been tasked to investigate potential war crimes in the country, marks the first time the United Nations has assigned blame for the use of the chemical agent. Specifically, the commission said “reasonable grounds exist to believe” that government forces loyal to President Bashar Assad unleashed a chemical agent, likely chlorine, on civilians in northern Syrian villages eight times in April.
According to the report, victims and medical personnel described symptoms caused by exposure to chemicals and witnesses told of a chlorine-like smell immediately after seeing government helicopters drop barrel bombs on the civilian-inhabited areas in Idlib and Hama provinces eight times between the 11th and 29th of April.
The commission also noted widespread and systematic civilian killings by Islamic State, which now controls a swath of north and eastern Syria. It said attacks have taken place in the northern province of Aleppo and in the northeastern region of Raqqa, a stronghold of the group. The findings mean that U.N. officials now believe Islamic State has committed crimes against humanity in Syria and Iraq.
“This is a continuation — and a geographic expansion — of the widespread and systematic attack on the civilian population,” according to the report by the four-member commission chaired by Brazilian diplomat and scholar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro.
The latest report, based on 480 interviews and documentary material, cited dozens of documented public executions in Aleppo and Raqqa during the bloody and complex Syrian civil war that the United Nations says has killed more than 190,000 people.
Crowds of people including children have reportedly watched as the group’s fighters behead suspects or shoot them in the head at close range. The purpose, according to the commission, is “to instill terror among the population, ensuring submission to its authority.”
But the commission also emphasized that Assad’s government forces continue to perpetrate crimes against humanity — the most serious and systematic type of widespread crime against civilians— through massacres and systematic murder, torture, rape and disappearances.  AP

John Heilprin, Geneva