ADF International calls on US State Department to declare ISIS committing genocide

WASHINGTON – ADF International is calling upon the U.S. State Department to meet a March 17 congressional deadline and declare ISIS a perpetrator of genocide against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East. The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed its own genocide resolution Monday.

ADF International provided an extensive analysis of genocide in the Middle East as part of a report the Knights of Columbus provided Secretary of State John Kerry. The European Parliament declared last month that ISIS has committed genocide.

“The evidence for a declaration of genocide is overwhelming. The State Department should quickly recognize the atrocities of ISIS for what they clearly are,” said ADF International Executive Director Doug Napier. “Our analysis and the rest of the detailed report provided to Secretary Kerry makes it abundantly clear that the genocide designation is clearly warranted.”

ADF International has been actively encouraging various bodies around the world to apply the genocide designation to ISIS and then act upon it, most recently at the 31st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council currently taking place in Geneva, Switzerland. ADF International is hosting a side event at the UN’s Geneva headquarters on Thursday to discuss the genocide issue.

“To date, no adequate steps have been taken to respond to the situation of Christians in Syria and Iraq…,” the ADF International report provided to Kerry explains. “In order to change the situation, we first must recognize the persecution of Christians as genocide and not as unrelated single events of persecution or discrimination.”

The number of Christians has dropped from two million to less than one million in Syria, and from 1.4 million to less than 260,000 in Iraq in just a few years. The Yazidis in the region of Kurdistan have been almost entirely wiped out. The atrocities include assassinations of church leaders, torture, mass murders, kidnapping, sexual enslavement and systematic rape of Christian and Yazidi girls and women, and the destruction of churches, monasteries, and cemeteries.

The resolution of the European Parliament followed a nearly unanimous vote at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Jan. 27 that also condemned the atrocities committed by ISIS as genocide.

ADF International is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.