Time to end dystopian deadlock - Syrian crisis intensifies

It’s four months since Isis was driven from Raqqa, the Syrian city styled as the caliphate’s capital by the jihadi barbarians.

After seven years of incomprehensible savagery and half-a-million lives lost, violence is not ebbing, but rather intensifying. The United Nations continues to chide us for our inaction, warning of unprecedented suffering in a country that has endured so many crimes and such desperation. Whole swathes of the country were, for the last number of years, held in a death grip by medieval fantasists, who imagined that their multiple and particularly gruesome murders honoured their god.