As innocent civilians continue to be slaughtered within the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo, our greatest present-day humanitarian catastrophe can be largely attributed to the Muslim world having failed the people of Syria.

Even though many nations and organisations, especially the United States and the United Nations through inaction, and Russia through direct aggression, rightfully bear the majority of collective blame for their woeful treatment of Syria, it is important to acknowledge that 1.7 billion Muslims have also let the people of Syria down in several different ways.

Independent war-crimes investigators working for the Commission for International Justice and Accountability once smuggled out of Syria “more than 600,000 official documents tracing the systematic torture and murder” of tens of thousands of suspected members of the opposition, as reported in The New Yorker. According to these groups, these official documents were direct orders “emanating from President Bashar al-Assad’s highest-level security committee and approved by President Assad himself”.

The Syrian Government and its Russian benefactors have been violating international law for several months by dropping incendiary bombs on areas populated by civilians, according to an August 2016 report by Human Rights Watch.

“The Syrian Government and Russia should immediately stop attacking civilian areas with incendiary weapons,” Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch, said in the report. “These weapons inflict horrible injuries and excruciating pain, so all countries should condemn their use in civilian areas.”

And yet, despite the reckless destruction of so many Muslim lives, two supposedly Islamic countries — Iran and Saudi Arabia — are acting like petulant children, callously using Syria as the latest staging ground in their Sunni-Shia proxy war for regional power. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are funding their respective fighting forces, with the Syrian civilian population as the casualties of their endless crossfire.

Of course, the Sunni-Shia framing of the continuing Saudi Arabia-Iran proxy war is something of a misnomer: the fight is about political power, not theology, and both of these apparently Muslim countries should be ashamed of themselves for using innocent Syrian women and children as expendable pawns in their dastardly geopolitical chess game.

Meanwhile, international Muslim organisations such as the Arab League and the Organisation for Islamic Co-operation have also completely failed in mobilising 57 Muslim-majority nations in adequately addressing the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Wealthy petro-monarch Gulf Arab states have been cruelly remiss in accepting Syrian refugees, probably because it would trigger legal protections for the refugees under international law.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are more than 2.764 million Syrian refugees living in tent cities in the neighbouring country of Turkey, making theirs the largest refugee population since Afghan citizens began fleeing their conflict-ridden nation in the Seventies.

“As a Muslim, I am shocked and appalled at the complete abandonment by the Muslim world of the plight of their brothers and sisters in Syria,” Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, said during a recent interview.

“We always see massive protests [in the Muslim world] if an offensive cartoon is drawn against our Prophet. But we have seen silence as genocidal massacres take place against Muslim women and children in Syria.”

Moustafa added that not a single Muslim country has effectively intervened to help the Syrian people, outside a failed effort at a ceasefire by the Turkish Government.

Finally, our own American-Muslim community of seven million has also failed the Syrian people miserably by inadequately mobilising to help them. We have not succeeded in lobbying the White House and Congress in any meaningful manner, nor have we managed to pressure our elected lawmakers to do away with no-fly zones or to create humanitarian corridors that would allow civilian populations to escape widespread destruction.

Even though our American-Muslim community raised millions of dollars for Syria aid efforts during fancy suburban fundraising banquets, we have been utterly unable to leverage our political capital to demand that the White House and Congress take decisive action in ending the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.

One of the few glimmers of hope are groups such as the Syrian American Medical Society, which provided essential medical services to more than 2.3 million people inside Syria and 320,000 Syria refugees last year.

There is a very well-known verse from the Koran, which states that “any person who saves the life of one person, it shall be as if they saved all humanity”.

Even though our entire global community is collectively responsible for our tragically weak response to the continued carnage against the Syrian people, I concede that our global Muslim community bears much of the blame when it comes to the disaster in Syria. I pray that God forgives us for living our charmed lives while millions of other people are just trying to stay alive every day.

• Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com and author of Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies & Threatens Our Freedoms