To date, the civil war in Syria has claimed close to 500,000 lives and sent millions of refugees fleeing across the world. Those injured and maimed physically and psychologically are in the millions.

The extreme brutality of the conflict is symbolised by the haunting image of a five-year-old child pulled alive from rubble after government bombardment of a residential area in the city of Aleppo. The child is covered by white soot from crushed rubble. Blood traces lines on his soot covered face as it trickles down.

He is not crying or whimpering. He sits still. The only indication that he is alive is the blinking of eyelashes laden with the white dust, and the trembling rocking his tiny body. But his stare fixates the camera, and bores into our collective conscience.

The image puts a human face on the statistics of the injured and killed. It brings immediacy to the inferno that is Syria. But most hauntingly, it reminds us of the evil that lurks in our souls, no matter our pretensions to civilisation, no matter our devotion to our faiths.

What thoughts are running through the mind of the five-year-old child as he sits staring at the camera? Where is my mother? What just happened? Maybe these and other questions run through his mind. But one of those questions must be “Why”? Perhaps not so explicitly, but shocked incomprehension is a subtle yet more profound “Why”?

Two impulses have fuelled strife and conflict throughout the history of human society: Hunger for power and wealth by individuals or nations on the one hand, and hypocrisy and expediency of individuals or nations that are in a position to do something on the other.

Thus in 1938, Britain and France decided on a policy of appeasement in the face of Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakian land and resources. And in the 1960s, the United States hid its appeasement of thieving Latin American dictators in anti-communist rhetoric. In both cases, the result of the twin impulses was thousands of dead in Czechoslovakia and in Latin America.

The same principle applies in our context. Robert Mugabe’s pogroms left thousands dead in Matabeleland in the 1980s, and maimed and killed hundreds, of opposition members in the 1990s and 2000s, while South Africa under Thabo Mbeki and later Jacob Zuma hid its appeasement under anti-Western rhetoric.

In Syria, the same impulses are at play. On the one hand, you have a thieving and murderous regime, hell-bent on clinging to power, while on the other you have world and regional powers preoccupied with protecting their strategic interests.

Russia pretends to be helping Assad fight terrorists, but is in fact interested in projecting itself as a world power while also eyeing lucrative trade deals with Syria.

The United States and the European powers wring their hands and pretend concern for the poor Syrian people, but their real concern is about Russian and Iranian encroachment in Syria, and how an implosion in Syria would change the regional strategic balance of power. They are also alarmed about the effect continued instability will have on the flow of oil.

So Assad continues to drop barrel bombs on civilians. Russian jets bomb hospitals and schools. American and European-backed rebels shell civilian neighbourhoods. The terrorists murder civilians under their control. Each, pretending piety, blames the other.

What to do? The UN Secretary-General’s diplomacy must be more forceful in trying to re-establish some moral basics. First, Assad must be held fully accountable for the war. If ever there was an opportunity for the International Criminal Court to rid itself of the wrongful accusation by African presidents that it only targets them, this is it.

European powers and the United States must put, by way of diplomacy and sanctions, maximum pressure on Russia to stop bombardment of Aleppo, while at the same time firmly telling Iran and Turkey to keep away. They must also rein in the rebels under their influence and make it clear that they, too, will be held accountable for crimes they commit.

But of desperate urgency is a ceasefire and negotiations. Assad will not come to the negotiating table when he thinks, as he now does, that he can achieve a military victory over the rebels. So the US and its allies must ensure the rebels are not defeated.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based social and political commentator. E-mail: [email protected]