Syria's President Bashar al-Assad delivers a speech to Syria's parliament in Damascus on June 3, 2012, in this handout photograph released by Syria's national news agency SANA.SANA/Reuters
The cellphone videos are particularly gruesome: badly charred bodies, with flies feeding on what remains; other bodies showing apparent stab wounds, some with intestines spilling out. They are the latest evidence of a vicious massacre in villages west of the central Syrian city of Hama.
Local activists say as many as 82 people were killed Wednesday, mostly by shooting at close range or by stabbing. Many of the bodies were set afire the activists say.
They also say some 20 children were among the victims – the videos show a smaller number of young bodies. Women also were killed in the attack, they say, although it's difficult to tell how many as, in some cases, it's hard to tell men from women, the bodies were so badly burned.
In early afternoon Wednesday, United Nations monitors were reported to be on their way to the scene to verify the findings. Earlier reports that the monitors were barred by Syrian forces from entering the area were denied by a UN spokesman.
Whoever is doing this – and the most likely culprits are freelance gangs of thugs sympathetic to the regime of Bashar al-Assad – are not doing the Syrian President any favours.
The worldwide reaction of horror is firming up a previously diffuse international campaign to end the violence.
In neighbouring Turkey, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the latest evidence shows that "Assad has doubled down" his tactics of trying to terrorize the population into submission.
At the United Nations, former secretary-general Kofi Annan is to address the Security Council Thursday on the progress, or lack of progress, in his peace initiative, now grown more crucial in the wake of the latest civilian killings. A request for a "fortified" effort will get a sympathetic hearing.
In Beijing, Russian and Chinese leaders condemned the violence and insisted it end immediately.
Russia earlier this week made it clear it does not insist that Mr. al-Assad remain in power any longer. Rather, Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said, Moscow only insists that a solution in Syria be political and arrived at internally, without any foreign military intervention.
Even Mr. al-Assad himself condemned last week's Houla massacre as monstrous and denied any involvement.
The fact that it is the Syrian leader himself who suffers the most politically by these horrifying attacks sustains the theory that it is someone with an interest in seeing the regime fall that is behind the massacres. Syrian officials speak of "terrorist gangs" doing the job, pointing to al-Qaeda as a possible director of the operations.
Local citizens, however, insist that the perpetrators were Alawites from nearby villages who entered the communities after a shelling of the communities by Syrian artillery – the same method of operation said to have been employed in Houla.
"All killings are now sectarian in character," said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian activist and fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. "The killers are Alawites; the victims Sunnis."
It will likely be only a matter of time, now, before Sunnis attack the Alawite communities in response.
Whether Mr. al-Assad is responsible or not for directing the murdering gangs is quickly becoming irrelevant. The fact that the massacres are being perpetrated on his watch, and he has not ended them, marks him as the one to target.