Even by the already perverse standards of Syria’s war, events there last week were grotesquely surreal.

As a Russian orchestra played Bach in the ancient ruins of Palmyra, recently retaken from Islamic State (IS) jihadists, bombs were falling on an improvised camp near the town of Sarmada where Syrians uprooted by the war had taken refuge.

It has now been confirmed that among those taking part in the Palmyra musical spectacle was the cellist, Sergei Roldugin, President Vladimir Putin’s friend whose name surfaced last month in the Panama Papers scandal indicating he had $2 billion in offshore accounts. This only added to what many saw as a tawdry and tasteless opportunist stunt.

In its propaganda intent the Russian performance was very different from the filmed execution of 25 people on the same spot last year by IS, but it still left many around the world who saw television pictures of the concert with an uneasy feeling.

It was yet another if somewhat bizarre reminder that nothing about the war in Syria is as it appears.

If the conflict at times takes on a surreal feel then just as disquieting is the apparent lip-service being paid to a dysfunctional truce by the major players and parties seeking to find a political solution to the conflict.

Slowly, unavoidably however, the UN it seems is being forced to speak out as evidence mounts of ceasefire violations and the perpetration of widespread and systematic war crimes

Yesterday there was yet more evidence of war crimes having also been committed in neighbouring Iraq, with the UN announcing that more than 50 mass graves have so far been found in parts of the country previously controlled by IS. The most recent grave was discovered in the city of Ramadi and may contain the remains of up to 40 people.

Human remains have also been found in mass graves near Sinjar in northern Iraq, near Anbar in western Iraq and in Tikrit in the north of the country.

It appears the people targeted include tribesmen, Iraqi soldiers, women and people from the minority Yazidi sect.

UN envoy Jan Kubis told the UN Security Council that it was "evidence of the heinous crimes" IS had committed and that the international community should "take steps to ensure the accountability" of IS fighters.

"I condemn in the strongest possible terms the continued killings, kidnapping, rape and torture of Iraqis by IS, which may constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes and even genocide," said Kubis who is the UN's special representative in its assistance mission for Iraq.

Bringing IS to account is of course easier said than done given the ongoing threat they still pose in both Syria, Iraq and across the region.

Even if such accountability were possible, it is not only IS that stands accused of war crimes.

If initial UN reports are anything to go by, Thursday’s airstrikes in Syria on the al-Kammouneh camp near the town of Sarmada, were most likely carried out by Syrian government aircraft that incinerated the tented community where displaced civilians were living.

Humanitarian agency Mercy Corps whose European headquarters are in Edinburgh is one of the few aid organisations working in the al-Kammouneh camp which sits in northern Syria about six miles from the border with Turkey.

"We distribute buckets for new arrivals to use for bathing, laundry or other personal chores. After the strikes hit, our team saw people running with those same buckets full of water, trying to put out the fires. The tents and tarps were smoldering," says Xavier Tissier, North Syria director for Mercy Corps.

"I don't know how this place could be considered a target. We're humanitarians. If this were a military settlement, we wouldn't be here," Tissier added.

Tissier’s insistence that the area was used for humanitarian purposes only was echoed by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights who described that attacks as almost certainly a deliberate war crime.

“Given these tent settlements have been in these locations for several weeks, and can be clearly viewed from the air, it is extremely unlikely that these murderous attacks were an accident,” Al Hussein said.

And so it goes on. The bombing of hospitals and camps for the displaced, doctors, aid and rescue workers killed, civilians starving, mass graves, the numbers of dead and wounded mounting every day.

In all the grisly statistics make nonsense of a so-called truce and raise pressing questions about the pursuit of a political solution to the crisis.

It was only a few weeks ago that the United States and Russia agreed to a ceasefire over the strategically important city of Aleppo in the north of Syria which was supposed to last for 48 hours. While violence did decrease slightly in the aftermath of the agreement, the guns did not fall silent for long and if anything the deal seems likely to have only delayed the larger struggle for control of the city.

Even the veteran diplomat Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria, has struggled to hide the international community’s obvious sense of frustration and concern. De Mistura appealed to both Washington and Moscow to come together to stave off what his humanitarian coordinator warned on Thursday would be a new “catastrophe” if violence did not stop.

“How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?” de Mistura asked, throwing a question back at journalists after reporting privately to the UN Security Council on Wednesday as to how talks in Geneva were progressing.

As Roy Gutman writing in the influential and widely respected Foreign Policy magazine highlighted a few days ago, the Obama administration has chosen not to spotlight what by most definitions are widespread and systematic war crimes.

Only occasionally has it laid blame on the Syrian Air Force for bombing hospitals and other civilian targets but rarely does it refer to Russian violations. At no point does Washington share publically the clear breaches of the ceasefire it is overseeing, insisting that such information is classified.

With US air force planes constantly crossing Syrian airspace carrying out sorties against Islamic State and other targets, it is inconceivable that they do not have intelligence regarding civilians being targeted

“I am 100 percent certain we know who is flying where,” was how Christopher Kozak of the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, DC, think tank summed up the situation.

“The fact we don’t want to talk about it is very distressing.”

Distressing it certainly is, especially for those innocent civilians bearing the brunt of air strikes like the one on al-Kammouneh camp that killed dozens and left the camp in ruins, and body parts strewn around the area.

“My staff, along with other organisations, will leave no stone unturned in their efforts to research and record evidence of what appears to be a particularly despicable and calculated crime against an extremely vulnerable group of people,” said Al-Hussein, UN high commissioner for human rights.

Predictably perhaps the Washington would only say it had not confirmed who carried out the strike, but conceded that no US or coalition aircraft were operating in the area.

Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders, the international humanitarian agency which operates a camp for 80,000 internally displaced Syrians in nearby Atmeh and had provided vaccinations to the refugees in al-Kammouneh, said the attack showed that civilians are bearing the brunt of the military campaigns and diplomatic inaction that prevail over Syria right now.

“It is extremely concerning … and a clear sign again that civilians are paying the price in this conflict,” said Sam Taylor, MSF’s communications coordinator for Syria.

What diplomats refer to as “a regime of calm” when talking of any ceasefire or truce could not be further from the truth.

Only yesterday Russia’s defence ministry used that very term to describe a three-day extension to a halt in fighting in and around Aleppo. But still the shells fall and the gunfire continues.

For now there is no “regime of calm” in Syria. Any talk of such merely masks the harsh reality of the war’s unabated prosecution.