In February, ISIS beheaded 20 Egyptian Christians in Libya. It massacred some 700 Turkmen in a northern Iraq village in August. Last month, Kurdish forces uncovered a mass grave that’s believed to contain the remains of at least 70 Yazidis.
The group appears to have specifically targeted religious minorities during its brutal takeover of territory in Iraq and Syria. As far as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is concerned, the persecution of the Christian, Shia, Turkmen, Shabak, and Yazidi minorities should be considered genocide. A new report from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said that ISIS has carried out genocide against the Yazidi community and perpetrated grave crimes against many other religious minorities.
“We think that both ISIS’ own rhetoric as well as its actions make it very clear that [genocide] is its intentions vis-à-vis these other very distinct communities in the area where it’s rampaging,” Katrina Lantos Swett of USCIRF told ThinkProgress.
According to a report by Yahoo News citing sources in the Obama administration, the U.S. is close to characterizing the attacks against the Yazidi community in Iraq as ones that constitute genocide.
In August 2014, 50,000 of Yazidis fled into the mountains to escape impending attacks from ISIS.
It was after reports of the siege around Mount Sinjar that President Obama decided to take military action against the extremist, Islamist militant group.
On Thursday, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a report stating that ISIS carried out crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing against other minority groups in Ninewa province last summer. It also said that the self-proclaimed Islamic State perpetrated genocide against the Yazidi population of Ninewa, Iraq last year.
The Museum found evidence ISIS not only killed and injured Yazidis, but attempted to prevent births, and convert children in an attempt to systematically wipe out the Yazidi people.
“By refusing Yezidis any option to avoid death or forced conversion, IS[IS] demonstrates that its actions were calculated with the intent of destroying the community and thereby different from its attacks against other minorities, which were part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing,” wrote Naomi Kikoler, the report’s author.
Since initial reports about the plight of the Yazidi community made headlines last year, the religious community of about 500,000 people has continued to suffer rape, enslavement, and mass killings in Iraq and Syria.
ISIS has similarly targeted other religious minorities in its brutal campaign.
“Being a Turkman, a Shabak, a Yazidi, or a Christian in ISIS territory can cost you your livelihood, your liberty, or even your life,” Sarah Leah Winston of Human Rights Watch (HRW) said even before the Mount Sinjar siege took place.
HRW noted that ISIS has taxed, detained, tortured, and killed religious minorities in the region in controls. It has also destroyed churches, religious shrines, and Shia mosques in an attempt to block the practice of any faith besides its own brand of extremist Sunni Islam.
As a consequence, the region’s already beleaguered minorities have suffered massive blows.
Twelve years ago, Iraq was home to about one million Christians. That number has fallen to 275,000 or so due to years of war and a murderous campaign against them by ISIS. Many have wondered if the militant group will ring the death knell of Christianity in the Middle East.
The diminished ranks of not just Christians but other minorities makes the threat they face from ISIS even more grave, according to Lantos Swett of USCIRF.
“The smaller the community, the more existential and overwhelming the threat to their survival is when they are targeted for these largescale attacks and massacres, enslavements and forced conversations,” she said.
By designating the attacks against Iraqi and Syrian religious minorities to be genocide, the U.S. government won’t necessarily have to take any additional action to save the persecuted groups.
The 1948 Convention on Genocide calls on signatories to “provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide” it does not compel action against what it describes as the “odious scourge” of genocide.
This is not a time for us to be cautious or muted in our denunciation. It is a time for us to boldly declare that what they are doing is the worst of crimes and that is genocide.
Although the Secretary of State Colin Powell declared the killing of non-Arab people in Darfar, Sudan to be genocide, a secret memo from the State Department to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the designation had “no immediate legal — as opposed to moral, political or policy — consequences for the United States.”
Lantos Swett and others at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom are hoping that the designation will compel further action from the U.S. government against ISIS.
“This is not a time for us to be cautious or muted in our denunciation,” she said. “It is a time for us to boldly declare that what they are doing is the worst of crimes and that is genocide.