US Holocaust Museum supports Iraq Yazidi community genocide claim against

Cover of new report issued by the U.S.

“The self-proclaimed Islamic State is carrying out a widespread, systematic, and deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity against religious minorities in Iraq exclusively due to their religious beliefs”, said museum chairman Tom Bernstein in a statement.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a press report on Thursday saying militants of the extremist Islamic State group committed genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq. “We didn’t just see the intent” to commit genocide, “we actually saw acts representing that intent”, said Naomi Kikoler, deputy director of the center, who traveled to Iraq to do the interviews.

The crimes were committed against Christian, Yazidi, Turkmen, Shabak, Sabaean-Mandaean and Kaka’i people in Nineveh province between June and August 2014, said a report by the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. Res. 75) urging the administration to call these attacks on all of the minorities groups in the area, including Christians and Yazidi, “genocide”.

“Today is in many ways a sad and solemn day – thankfully genocide and the commission of mass atrocities and crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing is rare”.

Islamic State militants have seized swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria. It added: “We sat with Yazidi men as they wrote name after name of their missing family members-wives and daughters, who they believed were kidnapped, and sons and brothers, whose circumstances they did not know”. “Their release must be a priority”, it said.

Kikoler said that listening to Elias’s story, “I thought of my own family’s experiences and I thought of seventy years ago when my grandfather lost his entire family in the Holocaust”.

Publication of the report comes as Iraqi Kurdish forces backed by U.S.-led airstrikes blocked a key Islamic State group supply line with Syria as they fought to retake the town of Sinjar from the jihadists.

“I am proud that the museum is speaking out on behalf of Iraqi minorities”.

“Targeting the largest population centres of Yazidi people, killing men, kidnapping and enslaving women and children, and destroying religious shrines suggests a pattern from which the intent to destroy a religious group can be further inferred”, the report states.

This isn’t the first time the Islamic State group has been accused of committing genocide against the Yazidis.