Some said "shabbiha" gunmen from Assad's Alawite minority, long armed by the elite in Damascus, may be pursuing a campaign to drive out Sunnis to create a buffer zone around an Alawite safe haven of last resort along the coast. It raises the risk of a Yugoslav-style break-up of Syria that would set off tremors across the religious and ethnic faultlines of the Middle East.

"These massacres are a kind of ethnic cleansing," said a prominent politician from the Christian community across the border in Lebanon, which saw 15 years of communal blood-letting up to 1990. "They are purging their areas like in Bosnia."
[snip]
"Militarily, there are no important victories the regime is achieving. It shows that they have entered the final stage, which is to start regrouping in their own areas."

The United Nations has condemned the violence against civilians, but has been unable to agree on appropriate action. A report commissioned by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (CoI) on Syria, cites that war crimes, including murder, extrajudicial killings and torture, and gross violations of international human rights, including unlawful killing, attacks against civilians and acts of sexual violence, have been committed in line with State policy, with indications of the involvement at the highest levels of the Government, as well as security and armed forces. The report also concludes that the Government forces and Shabiha fighters were responsible for the Houla massacre. While opposition forces also committed war crimes, including murder and torture, the CoI says that their violations and abuses were not of the same gravity, frequency and scale as those committed by Government forces and Shabiha militias.

Syrian government forces have used sexual violence to torture men, women, and boys detained during the current conflict. Witnesses and victims also told Human Rights Watch that soldiers and pro-government armed militias have sexually abused women and girls as young as 12 during home raids and military sweeps of residential areas.

“Sexual violence in Syria is not systematic—it’s not like Rwanda,” said Dr. Zahra, a Syrian gynecologist working with refugee women in Antakya, Turkey, not far from the Syrian border, where nearly an estimated 10,000 Syrians are living, having fled their country. “But it is happening. It is happening every day.”

The truth, in other words, is bad enough. But getting accurate and reliable data on rape in Syria is, of course, extremely difficult, due to the chaos and danger of operating in a war zone. Cultural and religious beliefs are a further hindrance to accurate reporting. A woman’s virginity is closely linked to the concept of honor—not just the victim’s but also her family’s. A recent U.N. Commission of Inquiry report on Syria cites five instances of women who committed suicide after being raped, so intense is the shame associated with the crime. “People just cannot talk about it,” said Dr. Zahra. As the C.O.I. report noted, “Chronic under-reporting has made judging the magnitude of this violation difficult.” That is likely true as well for male rape, which has been reported in prisons and detention centers.

“Rape happens because we have no state now,” the lawyer told me. “We have no laws. There is violation from both sides. The government side is guilty because of the number of people in detention. And the opposition side has their own courts, and we are also hearing many cases of rape committed by the rebels.” He sighed deeply. “We have seen the beginning. But there is no end.”

HAYES: There’s a — a pretty shocking video by “The New York Times” posted today. It’s Syrian rebels executing captured Assad soldiers, a gunshot to the back of the head, naked.

If the U.S. attacks Syria, do those men in those videos become, by definition, our allies?

KERRY: No. In fact, I believe that those men in those videos are disadvantaged by an American response to the chemical weapons use because it, in fact, empowers the moderate opposition.

We all know there are about 11 really bad opposition groups — so-called opposition. They’re not — they’re fighting Assad. They are not part of the opposition that is being supported by our friends and ourselves. That is a moderate opposition. They condemn what has happened today and they will — they are and we are busy separating the support we’re getting from any possibility of that support going to these guys.

As Congress holds hearings to determine a response to that attack, Middle East experts say it's imperative to understand the major religious players in Syria, and why they are fighting.

The stakes couldn't be higher, experts say.

"If we come and and give one group a total win, we may be setting up an ethnic cleansing," Landis said.

Outside the conflict, in sprawling camps and overloaded host communities, aid workers report a soaring number of incidents of domestic violence and rampant sexual exploitation.

But this is a deeply conservative society. The violence suffered by Syrian women and girls is hidden under a blanket of fear, shame and silence that even international aid workers are loth to lift. [snip]

“There is a tendency to think that once [women] have crossed the border, they are safe”, says Melanie Megevand, a specialist in gender-based violence at International Rescue Committee charity. “But they just face a different violence once they become refugees.” In a reversal of the cultural norm, many families here are headed by women. Fathers and husbands have either been killed or gone to fight.

Um Firas has lived in Mafraq, near Zaatari, for more than a year since escaping Homs. She rarely leaves her home. Her husband disappeared years before the war so she is alone, accumulating an enormous debt to cover her rent. She still believes her family is better off in debt than inside the camp.

She is particularly concerned for her teenage daughter, who took to sunbathing until her skin burned in Syria. “She told me, ‘If I turn black, the Shabiha [pro-government militia] might not want to rape me”, she said. “They were targeting women. Iranian and Hezbollah fighters came into our neighborhood with their swords drawn. The women they found, they raped. They burned our homes”, she adds, too exhausted by grief to stop crying.

That is specifically to enforce the international norm, almost a century old now, that came out of World War II — out of the horrors of World War I — whereby 189 nations have signed an agreement that we will not use chemical weapons in warfare.

And — and Bashar Al-Assad joins with Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein as being somebody who has crossed that line.

Ethnic Cleansing is the deliberate and systematic removal of a racial, political, or cultural group from a specific geographical area. A 1993 United Nations Commission defined it more specifically as, "the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to render that area ethnically homogenous."

The term ethnic cleansing is different from genocide. These terms are not synonymous, yet the academic discourse considers both as existing in a spectrum of assaults on nations or religio-ethnic groups. Ethnic cleansing is similar to forced deportation or 'population transfer' whereas genocide is the intentional murder of part or all of a particular ethnic, religious, or national group. The idea in ethnic cleansing is "to get people to move, and the means used to this end range from the legal to the semi-legal”. Genocide is a subset of murderous ethnic cleansing. The war events in former Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia and Kosovo is an example for ethnic cleansing. Jews killed during Nazi regime is an example for genocide.