SEVEN years on and still the haunting pictures of a mother or father, their dead babe in arms comes to us daily from Syria. Seven years on and still the faces filled with grief or caked in dust and blood from the bombed blasted rubble from which they sometimes surface, stare out at us, shocked, terrified and pleading.

In basements whole families huddle, sticking close together so they don’t die alone. Everything imaginable has been used to kill them: Sarin nerve gas, barrel bombs, airstrikes, shelling, siege, starvation. Those who die are buried in makeshift cemeteries where gravediggers cannot keep up with the number of corpses that arrive. Even before the current violence now inflicted on the area of Eastern Ghouta in Syria, they would have had 20 to 50 graves on standby at any given time, these past few weeks though the numbers are in the hundreds.

For those maimed a few hard-pressed doctors treat them using expired drugs and anaesthetics. These same exhausted doctors and nurses work around-the-clock in ramshackle hospitals which themselves are targeted. Seven hospitals are reported to have been bombed since Monday. This is Syria, seven years on into a war that has become the defining outrage of our times.

Just like the pictures, so too do the words in the stories surfacing from Eastern Ghouta tell of a barbarism matched only by a self-inflicted blindness on behalf of some in the international community. “Flagrant war crimes” are being committed on an “epic scale,” says human rights group Amnesty International in a recent report, while another humanitarian group highlighted how civilians are “waiting to die” in Eastern Ghouta. Yet despite such warnings and overwhelming evidence, the world remains impotent when it comes to meaningful intervention.

Such is the frustration of some global bodies that words fail them. This week the United Nations children’s agency Unicef issued a blank “statement” to express its outrage, saying it had run out of words. Is this the best we can expect from the UN right now when it comes to the 400,000 people, most of them civilians, trapped in eastern Ghouta? What an indictment it is of the world body that one of its major agencies tasked with the protection of children from violence is reduced to the theatrical, hopeless gesture of issuing a blank statement.

Against this despairing backdrop the very fact that there is historical precedence from which the global community promised to learn lessons, only makes the complicity in atrocity worse. “We are standing before the massacre of the 21st century. If the massacre of the 1990s was Srebrenica, and the massacres of the 1980s were Halabja and Sabra and Shatila, then Eastern Ghouta is the massacre of this century right now,” was how one Syrian doctor working in this living hell described what is happening earlier this week.

It’s all too easy to think that the war in Syria doesn’t impact on us. Such an assumption is not only wrong but also dangerous in its neglect of the facts. For a start, none of what is happening militarily and politically in the country has much to do with Syria itself anymore. If the war in Syria ever did have an aim it has long since lost any semblance of that. Instead, right now the arbitrary slaughtering has all to do with cynical and ruthless power games and the idea that they will somehow remain confined only to Syria has already been dispelled. Think of the proxy battles alone that are currently under way and it’s impossible to argue that the Syrian conflict is not already impacting on the wider world. Right now it’s pitching secularists against Islamists, Shia against Sunni, the US against Russia, Israel against Iran, the US against Turkey, and compounded Turkey’s long-term battle against the Kurds. Anyone who believes that the war in Syria is something that we can simply turn a blind eye to and not inevitably be affected by is living in a fantasy world.

There are other ways, too, in which it has indelibly impacted on the wider world. For a long time it has consistently and some might argue catastrophically been eroding and undermining the global institutions that have shaped world affairs since the end of the Second World War.

The UN and its Security Council, the ultimate guardian and arbiter of member states’ conduct, have been massively discredited. Syria’s war has in effect altered the strategic balance of power of the world we live in. Along the way it has thrown up a massive refugee crisis that left some European countries at loggerheads as to how best to respond.

Then there is the mockery Syria’s war has made of efforts to uphold binding treaties such as the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention or prosecute alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. And lest we think it’s all the politicians and world leaders’ fault, let’s not forget that evidence shows that public pressure on western governments to do more to help has, if anything, declined as the war has spiralled on to a new level.

The situation is undoubtedly daunting but this only make efforts to make sure the UN Security Council enforces its resolutions calling for an end to sieges of civilian areas even more imperative. It must reiterate its message that there will be no impunity for those who commit war crimes and crimes against humanity and international humanitarian law must be upheld.

Now is not the time to lift the pressure or turn away from the plight of those hundreds of thousands of civilians in Eastern Ghouta many of whom not surprisingly believe they have been left to perish

“Are we really alive? Do others know we actually exist, and that we’re alive in these basements? asked mother and nurse Bereen Hassoun, earlier this week in a testimony she released to the world from inside besieged Eastern Ghouta. In whatever way we can as individuals, let’s try everything possible to make sure Ms Hassoun and those who share her plight are not abandoned to the vagaries of cynical power politics.