Washington: United States Secretary of State John Kerry said that the government has determined that ISIS’ action against the Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria amounted to genocide.
According to CNN, Kerry said that the ISIS had trapped and killed Yazidis in 2104 while enslaving thousands of Yazidi women and girls, “selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations,” executed Christians “solely for their faith” and also “forced Christian women and girls into slavery.”
“My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims. Without our intervention, it is clear that those people would have been slaughtered, ” he said.
Kerry said that in 2014, ISIS trapped Yazidis, killed them, enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, “selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations,” executed Christians “solely for their faith” and also “forced Christian women and girls into slavery.”
This is the first time that the United States has declared a genocide since Darfur in 2004.
The House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution branding the ISIS atrocities against Christian groups in Syria and Iraq as “genocide,” a term the State Department had been reluctant to use regarding the terror group.
Welcoming Kerry’s announcement, Iraqi Yazidi activist Mirza Dinnayi who has been helping evacuate former Yazidi slaves of ISIS to be rehabilitated in Germany, told CNN that this was a major step to stop the suffering of the Yazidi community at the hands of ISIS.
“I am very happy to hear that (the U.S.) will recognize the genocide of Yezidi and Christian minorities. This is an important step to stop the suffering of the persecuted people under the control of the extremist Islamic groups, especially ISIS. And this is also important for my community to trust the international community again, because we were left in the hands of Islamic State,” he said. (ANI)