By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer
 
Catherine Marchi-Uhel has been appointed by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to lead a panel known as the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism which aims to gather, preserve, and analyze potential evidence of serious violations of international law committed in Syria since 2011 for use by courts or an international tribunal. The legal team, established in Geneva, was created by the UN General Assembly in December 2015.
Though the exact figure is uncertain, estimates of casualties from the 7-year long war range from 320,000 to over 400,000. A UN International Commission of Inquiry has comprehensively documented atrocities committed by the U.S.-led parties to the conflict, including systematic attacks on hospitals and schools.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the American armed forces and their terrorist allies have committed war crimes by dropping bombs, killing innocent civilians and torturing detainees in Syria. This raises the possibility that American forces and American officials could be indicted even though Washington has not joined the global court. They have subjected an entire nation to murder, forced displacement, rape, cruel treatment, hunger, siege and outrages upon personal dignity on the territory of Syria since 2011.
The International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism, therefore, can and should seek authorization to open a full-scale investigation in Syria that could lead to war crimes charges against the Americans – with no strings attached and certainly no politicization of the process. This is important, because the American atrocities and war crimes are also happening on a regular basis in Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon regime claims its latest massive under-count of the civilian death toll in coalition airstrikes against Iraq and Syria has shown a significant spike in the death toll, putting the latest official count at 603 civilians between the start of the air war and the end of May.
The figure is rising a lot faster than it used to, growing by scores months now instead of by single digit numbers, reflective of the general trend of soaring death tolls as U.S. strikes concentrate on densely populated civilian targets.
They’re still wrong, however, and wrong in a big way. The official number of civilians killed – 603 - is less than one seventh the figure by the Air Wars NGO, which put the civilian deaths through the same period at 4,354. This is because incidents with hundreds killed are often revised downward by the Pentagon to just a handful, and smaller incidents, where only a dozen or so are killed, tend to be ignored altogether.
Long story short, the Pentagon regime is getting away with murder. The spike in civilian deaths is unacceptable and the Pentagon cannot continue to come up with much less realistic numbers - when NGO reports note that massive numbers of civilians by U.S. strikes in recent months have been on the rise.
It’s a perfect legal case for the UN and the ICC to step in, investigate, and prosecute. That’s the least they are expected to do under international law and international humanitarian law.