Lord David Alton of Liverpool has called on the British Government to act without delay and follow the United States by declaring Daesh (ISIS) atrocities a genocide against faith minorities.
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Congress had given Kerry until Thursday to make his determination, but on Wednesday, the State Department said he would need more time, making his announcement a surprise.
“Daesh is also responsible for crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing directed at these same groups, and in some cases also against Sunni Muslims, Kurds and other minorities”, he added.
Kerry, in his statement Thursday, recognized the existing military involvement by the United States and noted fundamental aspects of fighting genocide including emergency aid, recovering cities, investigating mass graves and providing material and psychological care (especially for victims of “gender-based violence” and escaped prisoners).
“We’ve degraded their leadership, attacked their revenue sources and disrupted their supply lines, and now we are engaged in a diplomatic initiative aimed at trying to end the war in Syria”, he said.
The United States is already leading a coalition that is fighting the militants, and American aircraft have been bombing Islamic State leaders and fighters, its oil-smuggling operations and even warehouses where the group has stockpiled millions of dollars in cash.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long sided with the Syrian regime of Bashar Al Assad.
Notably, Proclaim 16, the NRB International Christian Media Convention, held a special session on this genocide featuring Canon Andrew White, Vicar Emeritus of St. George’s Church in Baghdad, who spoke from firsthand experience about the terrors of ISIS.
He vowed to continue pressing for a negotiated settlement to the broader civil war to allow world militaries to focus their fire on the extremists.
“For those communities, the stakes in this campaign are utterly existential”, he said.
Kyle Matthews, senior deputy director at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, said he thinks that the federal government is avoiding the term because the Canadian mission against the Islamic State “does nothing to stop genocide”.
As part of the 2015 omnibus government spending bill (which passed in December), Congress included a resolution requiring the Obama administration to say whether Islamic State was committing genocide. “Their actions clearly constitute genocide”, he said, citing reports of Iraqi and Syrian Christians being tortured and crucified.
The State Department official would not be drawn on calls for a new court, but said the United States would work closely with fellow members of the UN Security Council.
“Today (March 17), Secretary Kerry responded to the unspeakable crimes carried out by ISIS”.
“We’re very confident we’ve done an enormous amount”, he told reporters as he walked down a hall at the State Department.
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“Daesh kills Christians because they are Christians, Yezidis because they are Yezidis, Shia because they are Shia”, Kerry said.
