Soaked in blood

The dispiriting death toll in West Asia

News reports that a non-governmental organisation has estimated that more than 100,000 people have died in fighting in West Asia - a third of them civilians - suggest that the civil war in places like Syria and Iraq in 2014 got worse, even compared to the already grim toll of the year before. More than 75,000 of those casualties came from Syria where the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad found itself pitted against the even more bloody Islamic State, known also as the ISIS. Mr Assad's regime has long punched above its weight in terms of the brutality with which its secret police and army put down any political opposition. This has helped strengthen the Islamic State, which this summer rampaged through parts of Syria and Iraq and looked likely to threaten both states. Its black flag and publicised beheadings made the organisation seem like something out of the era of the Crusades - with 21st century firepower. Recent internal divisions and reports that even its foot soldiers are growing weary within the blood-thirsty organisation may yet limit the ISIS from becoming a larger political force, but its capacity for cruelty towards Shias, the Kurdish minority and women remains at large.

In this sorry roll-call of countries with large-scale violence, Iraq is second with 15,000 deaths from internecine fighting. Another group puts the death toll even higher at 17,000 and observes that this is twice the number of those who died in the very uncivil strife in 2013; with a third of the country under the axis of the Islamic State, Iraq looks in danger of breaking up.

Civil war was sadly also the theme of the year in Libya with a couple of thousands dying in violence there between two powerful camps, who are making the popularly supported uprising against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 a distant memory. Nearly as many died in an utterly unequal battle between the Israeli army and the outmanned and outgunned Hamas in Palestine.

If there is a sense of eternal dejà vu and never-ending intractability to the bloody saga that marks Israeli-Palestinian relations, that sadly sums up the prospects for peace in West Asia in 2015. Its internal divisions notwithstanding, there is almost no prospect of the Islamic State making peace in either Syria or Iraq. The conflict in Libya gets worse, not better and Israel's treatment of Palestine shows no sign of changing. The only antidote to this grim picture is to remember that before the Islamic State took that name, the world knew Isis as the most gentle of Egyptian goddesses. When her jealous brother Set chopped her husband Osiris into countless pieces, his loving wife found the different parts of his body and put it back together bandaged and nearly whole. The world community and leaders within these troubled countries will have to rise to that seemingly impossible challenge. Given the religious fundamentalism that has spread far and wide in West Asia, it will take heroism of an uncommon order to turn back the descent into chaos and bloodshed.