>>17855302
"War crime" is a legalistic term and I don't blame people for having some skepticism about that, but it was an attempt to create some international legal framework after the world wars to reign in these excesses. What does happen in war is brutalization and dehumanization of human beings. The dehumanization of the "other" but also a process that brutalizes the self. It's like a descent into barbarism. It's really bad when it gets racial or across ethnic / sectarian lines.

It hasn't gotten a lot of news, but there are Sunni Muslim guys fighting the Druze in southern Syria, and it's brutal. I saw a video of a Druze convoy who had corpses of enemy fighters slung over the hoods of their trucks. The Sunni jihadi guys are also massacring civilians and hanging up corpses. They zip tie people and blow their brains out, kidnap / rape their women, and force the men to jump off balconies to their deaths while shooting them (they film this and put it on the internet).

It's just about power. It's like: we can do this to you, and you can't do anything, so know your place.