It is easy to forget the crimes of Bashar al-Assad in the ongoing crisis blighting the Middle East.
Islamic State’s ascension to the zenith of the global jihadist movement has captured the world’s attention through a series of filmic releases portraying brazen barbarism.
The images of "Jihadi John" menacingly wielding a burnished knife are now well known.
There are other horrors etched in our minds too, from the burning alive of the captured Jordanian pilot Muath Kassassbeh, to the mass enslavement of Yazidi women. Islamic State understands the power of propaganda and has harnessed the internet to project its message across the world.
In this regard the Syrian regime is different. It does not parade its torture victims in atmospheric videos and portrays itself as a vital actor in the war against violent jihadists. However, this is not now – nor has it ever been – the case.
Shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Syria became the primary thoroughfare for foreign fighters wanting to join al-Qaeda. Assad did not just turn a Nelsonian eye to this, but actively encouraged it.
His intelligence agencies were ordered to work closely with a Salafi cleric from Aleppo named Abu Qaqa, to ensure a steady supply of recruits were delivered into Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s hand, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time.
Indeed, Abu Qaqa was so valued by the Assad regime that when he was eventually killed, members of the Syrian government attended his funeral and Lebanese media reported that “his coffin was draped in a Syrian flag and the affair had all the trappings of a state occasion.”
Whatever your thoughts on the merits of the 2003 invasion, it is undeniable that the regime of President Assad actively conspired with jihadists to destabilise post-Saddam Iraq. This belies the posturing of Syrian Baathists who today project an image of being responsible international actors overrun by millenarian radicals.
Yet, for every crime committed by these jihadists you will find a comparable atrocity perpetrated by the Syrian regime. For example, Islamic State massacred tribesmen in Deir ez-Zour during a rebellion last year when they defied its brutal rule.
Similarly, forces loyal to President Assad have a deliberate policy of targeting civilians in areas beyond government control in order to maintain disorder and fear. Last Wednesday it deployed more than 103 barrel bombs; one every 14 minutes. Similarly last May, more than 40 people died in a single strike when a bakery in Manbij was targeted in this way.
These victims are not collateral damage caught in the fog of war. The Syrian regime has repeatedly and deliberately conspired in killing some of its most vulnerable citizens. In May 2012, forces loyal to President Assad stormed the town of Houla and massacred 108 people.
A United Nations report found that almost all had been subject to “summary executions” among them, 49 children under the age of 10. Some had their skulls cracked open through blunt force. Others were stabbed to death.
Indeed, violence against children helped fuel the uprising during its incipient phases. That time it was Hamza Khatib, a 13-year-old boy who was disappeared into the labyrinthine web of Assad’s subterranean torture chambers in April 2011. A month later he was dead. When his parents collected the body they found it in a state that would have made even the Marquis de Sade wince.
Khatib was covered in bruises and cigarette burns. Once the cigarettes were finished, his captors simply used the cavities formed from bullet wounds to his knees as a repository. Another cavity was also present, further up his body where his penis had been cut off and mutilated.
The heroic British aid worker, Dr Abbas Khan, who worked in a field hospital in Saraqeb, also documented the sadistic rituals of Assad’s regime after falling into their hands. “My detention has included repeated and severe beatings, largely for no reason other than the pleasure of my captors,” he wrote.
The day before he was due to be released, Dr Khan was murdered by the Syrian regime. Like Khatib, his emaciated corpse was covered in cigarette burns.
Irrefutable evidence of Assad’s systematic torture machine emerged after a Syrian military photographer known only as “Caesar” defected from the regime, taking more than 55,000 pictures of abuse with him.
A team of legal experts led by Sir Desmond de Silva QC, formerly chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, interviewed “Caesar” at length and scrutinised his pictures. They found their subject was “not only credible but that his account was most compelling.”
The idea that the Assad regime’s violence is somehow morally or strategically different to that of jihadist actors in Syria has become fashionable among some sections of the Western media. Perhaps a symptom of fatigue or sympathies forged during time spent as guests of the regime, mainstream commentators such as Patrick Cockburn and Peter Oborne have been at the forefront of this trahison des clercs.
According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, 95 per cent of all civilian deaths in the conflict have come from the regime. The refugees now fleeing to Europe do so as a direct result of Assad’s policies.
Any attempt to rehabilitate him within the international system would be as morally bankrupt as recognising Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as a legitimate head of state. Framed in that way, it should be obvious that the cure to Baghdadi’s murderous pathology does not lie within the Baathist poison.
Shiraz Maher is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation at Kings College London. Follow him on Twitter
Nick Kaderbhai is a Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation at Kings College London. Follow him on Twitter
This article was written by Shiraz Maher, Nick Kaderbhai and King's College London from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.