Page:Written Testimony (Hon. Frank Wolf - Confronting the Genocide of Religious Minorities - A Way Forward).pdf/1



Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, thank you for having this hearing regarding the atrocities that have taken place at the hands of the Islamic State against the religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.

In January of 2015, a group of us from the 21 Century Wilberforce Initiative, travelled to Northern Iraq in order to see the situation first-hand. After this trip, we released a report entitled “Edge of Extinction,” which documented some of what we witnessed. In the summary of the report, we indicated that: “Religious and ethnic minorities in Iraq are living at the edge of extinction. They are marginalized and under threat from the genocidal actions of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq resulting in the purging of religious and ethnic minorities from their historic homes. If immediate action is not taken, the existence of religious and ethnic minority communities such as Christians, Yezidis, Shabak and Turkmen will continue on a trajectory of precipitous decline into virtual non-existence.”

One Yezidi leader told us, ''“IS told us the problem was our religion, so that even if we run away to Kurdistan [the Kurds] will join [ISIS] and kill us because we are not Muslims. So we are told to just convert and join IS. Some [Yezidis] did convert. The majority of them refused and so they were transferred from Iraq to Syria and used as goods. IS wanted to kill all of the Yezidi people…[IS] says we are non-believers. But we want to be human and have human rights. We have no honor. We’ve lost our mothers and sisters.”''

A Christian Bishop who was displaced from Mosul said, ''“Does the American government recognize the thousands of years of heritage displaced in one day?...Does the media cover the burning of the churches?” He continued, “This is not just the end of Christianity, but the end of our ethnicity who have lived here for thousands of years. We believe this is genocide…''

What has happened to these religious minorities meets the Raphael Lempkin definition of genocide, which is as follows, “Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The whole world watched as the Islamic State broadcast the murder of the 21 Christians in Libya and others throughout Iraq and Syria. The world stood by, aghast, as the young Yezidi girls were sold as slaves and raped over and over. We continued to be horrified as story after story came out about forced conversions and the destruction of ancient cultural monuments and places of worship. We have seen the pictures of the mass graves. It has been apparent from the very