USCIRF Calls For US To Support Iraqi Victims Of ISIS On Anniversary Of Genocide Determination

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Marking the eighth anniversary of the 2016 determination by the United States that ISIS carried out a genocide against northern Iraq’s Yazidis, Christians, and Shi’a Muslims two years earlier, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has called on the US government to do more to support survivors of the 2014 jihadist campaign that involved mass murders, systematic abductions, rape and sexual slavery, forced labor, and forced religious conversion to Sunni Islam.

In a press release, the bipartisan USCIRF noted that Iraq’s diverse religious communities are still suffering the devastation wrought by ISIS against them.

“ISIS’s atrocities against Iraq’s religious and ethnic minorities were part of a deliberate campaign of genocide and crimes against humanity. Although ISIS’s threat has diminished, militant non-state actors and government-affiliated militias continue to perpetrate abuses against Yazidis, Christians, Shabaks, Shi’a, and Sunni Muslim Turkmen, and other religious and ethnic minorities,” USCIRF Commissioner Stephen Schneck said in the statement.

“USCIRF urges the United States to encourage the Iraqi government to curb the power of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and other state-affiliated forces who subject religious minorities to checkpoint harassment, interrogation, detention, torture, and efforts to usurp their political representation and leadership,” Schneck said.

In a further call to action, USCIRF Commissioner Frank Wolf added: “USCIRF calls on the US government to support the governments of Iraq and its Kurdistan Region in their missions to rescue the 2,700 missing and enslaved Yazidi women and girls.”

“The US must also emphasize to the Iraqi and Kurdistan Regional governments the urgency of fully implementing the 2020 Sinjar Agreement and making the region safe for the return of genocide survivors, so that hundreds of thousands of Yazidis and others among the 1 million-plus Iraqis languishing in internal displacement can go home,” Wolf attested.

Latest Worthy News