If you look at the UN Panel of Experts on Sri Lanka they talk about the conduct of the war in Sri Lanka basically being a grave challenge to the entire regime of international humanitarian law. It's not just one or two war crimes. It's basically threatening the entire system.
You compared Sri Lanka and Syria. There are many other countries that are eyeing Sri Lanka's model and thinking, okay, maybe we could use what's called the Sri Lankan option, which is the scorched earth tactics, not distinguishing between civilians and combatants.
I've heard, for example, anecdotally, of the Colombian government talking and threatening that in talks with FARC, or certainly you hear people in Pakistan who talk about it in the context of the Baloch or you've heard about it in Burma and in other countries looking at it and saying, “Okay, maybe we can learn from Sri Lanka's defeat of terrorism militarily”.
Certainly every year they have this military conference where they invite other countries' militaries to come to Sri Lanka and they talk about their example, their learning from the destruction of the LTTE. That's rather worrying if you are concerned about human rights as well as defeating terrorism.