OPINION:
Emerging suggestions of a forthcoming statement by the Obama administration declaring the targeted mass killing, rape and enslavement of the Yazidi community under the Islamic State as “genocide” speak of a decisive move that would convey to the international community the moral and legal responsibility to protect the victims of these crimes.
In Defense of Christians (IDC) wholeheartedly encourages the administration in this initiative of leadership, setting into motion adequate international response to the atrocities waged against the ancient Yazidi community in northern Iraq. IDC also calls upon the president to acknowledge that the Yazidi community alone has not suffered the brutal campaign of genocide by the Islamic State, or ISIS.
Journalist Michael Isikoff recently quoted an official at the State Department stating that crimes by ISIS against Christians and other minorities do not meet the “high bar set out in the genocide treaty.” The reference is to the 1948 United Nations treaty defining genocide as any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, including: killing; mental and bodily harm; the calculated destruction in whole or part of the group; forcibly preventing births; and the transference of children to another group.
The marking of Christian homes and businesses for extermination, the mass destruction of Christian churches, schools and monasteries, and the explicit targeting of Christian communities for death, rape and enslavement has been a standard war tactic of ISIS in its determination to ethnically cleanse the region of all who do not adhere to their religious worldview.
Earlier this year, ISIS proclaimed the gruesome beheading of 21 Coptic Christians “a message written in blood to the nation of the cross.” In October, the world was again horrified when a video of the execution of three Assyrian Christians by ISIS went public. Like previous mass execution of Christians publicized by ISIS, these men had committed no crime except staying true to their Christian faith, which they were asked to confess before being shot in the head by ISIS militants threatening the same fate for the more than 200 Christians still in their captivity.
Young boys are taken from their families and forced to enlist as ISIS militants. Yazidi and Christian women and girls are sold side-by-side as war booty to the ISIS sex-slave trade. Rape is systematically used as a weapon of forced conversion against all religious minorities.
In June, filmmaker Jordan Allott documented a conversation with an Iraqi Chaldean Christian family living as refugees in Irbil. Their teenage daughter had been abducted by ISIS in the invasion of Mosul. With hollow eyes the mother holds a picture of her daughter in hopes someone might recognize her, while the brother tells how they await every day for news about where she is and if she is still alive. Among the displaced Iraqi and Syrian Christian communities spread throughout the region, these stories have become agonizingly commonplace. The Melkite Catholic bishop of Aleppo has reported that 1,000 Christians, including two Orthodox bishops, have been kidnapped and murdered in his city alone.
On July 10, speaking of the plight of Christians under the Islamic State, Pope Francis declared, “A form of genocide — and I stress the word genocide — is taking place, and it must end.”
Meanwhile the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the world’s largest organization of experts on genocide, has stated in an open letter, “ISIS’ mass murders of Chaldean, Assyrian, Melkite Greek, and Coptic Christians, Yazidis, Shia Muslims, Sunni Kurds and other religious groups meet even the strictest definition of genocide.”
In September, Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, and Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo of California, co-chairs of the Congressional Caucus on Religious Minorities in the Middle East, announced the introduction of House Con. Resolution 75, decrying “those who commit or support atrocities against Christians and other ethnic and religious minorities, including Yazidis, Turkmen, Sabea-Mandeans, Kaka’e, and Kurds, and who target them specifically for ethnic or religious reasons, are committing, and are hereby declared to be committing, ’war crimes’, ’crimes against humanity’, and ’genocide.’ ” IDC and over 70 human rights experts and organizations, spanning the nation’s religious and political spectrum, have joined in an open letter to Congress expressing their support. To date, the resolution has gathered nearly 150 congressional co-sponsors.
Speaking for the nearly 7 million Middle Eastern Christian Diaspora in the United States, millions of American Christians, and people of good will, IDC beseeches the president to manifest the necessary political will to call genocide “genocide.” We applaud a move to bring to conscience the gravity of the terrifying plight of the Yazidi community under ISIS.
We also ask the president to remember that the genocide perpetrated by ISIS has not stopped with the Yazidis. Iraqi Christians, Turkmen and other religious minorities suffer the same targeted and systematic crimes of extermination. Their blood cries out no less, and their protection and preservation is as equally imperative as that of their Yazidi brothers, neighbors, countrymen and friends.
• Kirsten Evans is executive director of In Defense of Christians.
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