Brutality of civil war casts doubt on peace talks

BEIRUT (AP):

SYRIA'S CONFLICT was sparked by an act of brutality - the detention and torture of schoolchildren who spray-painted anti-government graffiti in a southern city. In the three years since, the civil war has evolved into one of the most savage conflicts in decades.

The atrocities have been relentless. Protesters gunned down in the streets. An opposition singer whose vocal chords were carved out. Beheadings and mass sectarian killings. Barrels full of explosives dropped from warplanes on to bakeries and homes.

It will be hard enough to find a political solution to Syria's crisis at an international peace conference convening in Switzerland today, given the vast differences between the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the opposition. But in a nation drowning in blood, reconciliation and justice over the atrocities seem even more distant.

UNITY WILL BE DIFFICULT

"The ethical and moral fabric of this society has been stretched to beyond breaking point," said Amr al-Azm, a United States-based Syrian opposition figure and professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio. "For a country to recover from such a traumatic rupture of the very glue that holds it together is not easy."

In the latest sign of the brutality, three prominent international war-crimes experts said they had received a huge cache of photographs documenting the killing of some 11,000 detainees by Syrian authorities.

David Crane, one of the three experts, told The Associated Press that the cache provides strong evidence for charging Assad and others for crimes against humanity - "but what happens next will be a political and diplomatic decision."