The withers of the Syrian regime will remain unwrung, for all the horrific visuals released by a defector in parallel with the ongoing round of the Geneva talks. At least two of the photographs show men tortured by strangulation by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Altogether, these gut-churning visuals are an echo of the worst forms of torture that were once perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and his sons in neighbouring Iraq… on occasion even for losing a football match.

The allegations, contained in a 31-page report released on Wednesday to coincide with the Geneva II talks, were described as a “smoking gun” that could see Syrian officials charged with war crimes. This is improbable quite yet given the dithering Western response, let alone intervention.

The timeline is crucial, however. The visual evidence has been advanced to the world just 24 hours after Assad insisted he had no intention of quitting and that the issue would not figure in Geneva. The latest round is one of the many that have been convened over the past six years to bring the beleaguered President to his knees and restore a measure of normality in Syria.

Not that abuses by Assad’s forces have not been documented by the United Nations; the latest cache of evidence in the form of graphic images is said to be more detailed than ever, and has been made available to the world body, several governments and human rights groups.

The report has been crafted by the London-based Sir Desmond de Silva, the former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone, Sir Geoffrey Nice, who was the lead prosecutor of the former Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, and Professor David Crane, who had indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia at the Sierra Leone court.

“This is documented industrial-scale killing,” was the immediate response of Mr De Silva. “”This is a smoking gun of a kind we didn’t have before. It makes a very strong case indeed.” Yes, indeed, it does. But Syria being Syria, a dramatic change in the greater canvas is hugely unlikely. The bereaved families were told that the cause of death was either a “heart attack” or “breathing problems”, though the photographs testify that the bodies were emaciated, blood-stained, and subject to torture.

On the sixth anniversary of the Arab Spring, the country exemplifies the worst in terms of man’s inhumanity to man… most particularly in the wake of the Russian military intervention. At another remove, the Western bloc has even stopped short of what they call a “humanitarian intervention”.

The empirical evidence of torture lends a new dimension to the ferment in Syria that appears to be getting away with recurrent violations of international law, and not merely in Aleppo. On closer reflection, ISIS has merely reinforced the crisis of civilization that plagues the country.