The 2016 genocide finding for Yazidis and Christians under ISIS rule

Some words are not descriptions. They are decisions. When a government says "genocide," it is not offering an adjective. It is putting a legal and moral label on a set of facts and inviting the world to act on it.

In March 2016 the United States did that, about the Islamic State. The finding was brief, the facts behind it were not, and the story of how it came about is a model of what happens when documentation, public pressure and a bipartisan Congress line up. Let me walk through it in order.

The definition: what genocide means

Start with the terms, because the law is precise. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, defines genocide in Article II as certain acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." The acts include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about its destruction, imposing measures to prevent births and forcibly transferring children.

Two features of that definition drive everything that follows. The first is intent: genocide is not just mass killing, it is the intent to destroy a group as such. The second is the list of protected groups, which includes religious groups. A campaign to wipe out a community because of its faith is, if the intent is proved, genocide.

The label matters because it carries consequences. The United States has a long-standing habit of using the word sparingly. One recent precedent is Darfur, where Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2004 that genocide had been committed. That is the baseline against which 2016 should be measured.

The assaults of 2014

The Islamic State, also called ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, swept across northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, taking Mosul in June and declaring a caliphate. It then turned to the minorities who lived in the region.

Sinjar. In early August 2014, ISIS attacked the Sinjar region, the homeland of the Yazidis, a small religious community with an ancient faith that ISIS regarded as heretical. Fighters killed men, and, according to later accounts by survivors and investigators, seized women and girls and sold them into slavery, and took boys for training. Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped without food and water, and the siege became an international emergency. President Obama authorized American airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops in the first days of August, and the strikes began on August 8, 2014, in part to prevent what he described as a potential act of genocide.

The Nineveh Plain. In the same weeks, ISIS moved into the Nineveh Plain, a historic homeland of Iraq's Christians, including Chaldean, Syriac and Assyrian communities whose roots go back many centuries. Towns such as Qaraqosh were emptied as residents fled in the first days of August 2014. In Mosul, earlier that summer, ISIS had given the Christians a choice: convert, pay a tax or leave. Many left with only what they could carry, and churches were burned or turned into offices.

These facts were not in serious dispute. They were reported by journalists, documented by human-rights groups and described by those who lived through it. What remained disputed, in Washington, was whether the label "genocide" applied.

The documentation

The case was not built overnight. Several lines of evidence came together.

• Survivors and journalists gave detailed accounts of the attacks, the enslavement and the forced conversions.
• The United Nations collected testimony and issued reports on the crimes against Yazidis and others in Iraq.
• The Knights of Columbus, working with another advocacy group, published a report of more than two hundred pages in March 2016 documenting the case that ISIS was committing genocide against Christians and other minorities, with a legal brief urging the Secretary of State to say so. A report from a religious fraternal organization is not a court judgment, but it was a serious, sourced compilation, and it put the question formally before the Secretary of State.
• Members of Congress from both parties pressed the administration for a determination.

The legal question was intent. ISIS had made its intent about the Yazidis plain in its own propaganda, which described them in religious terms and defended their enslavement. For Christians, the group's own statements and practices, including the demand for conversion, tax or exile and the destruction of religious sites, gave evidence of an effort to eliminate their presence. This is the kind of evidence that a determination relies on: the perpetrators' own words and a pattern of conduct.

The House resolution of March 14, 2016

Congress moved first. On March 14, 2016, the House of Representatives passed House Concurrent Resolution 75, which declared that the atrocities committed by ISIS against religious and ethnic minorities, including Christians and Yazidis, constituted genocide. It passed 393 to 0, with no member voting no.

Think about what that number means. A House that could not agree on many things agreed, across every party and faction, on this. The resolution's lead sponsors were Representatives Jeff Fortenberry, a Nebraska Republican, and Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat. The vote carried a message to the executive: Congress had reached a conclusion, and it wanted the administration to say the same.

A concurrent resolution is not law. It does not bind the President. It is an expression of the sense of Congress, and its force is political and moral. That is exactly why the vote was so valuable as a signal.

Secretary Kerry's finding of March 17, 2016

Three days later, on March 17, 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry announced the administration's determination. In remarks at the State Department, he said that in his judgment Daesh was responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims. He also said that Daesh was responsible for crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing directed at these same groups and, in some cases, also against Sunni Muslims, Kurds and other minorities.

There are three things to notice about the finding.

1. It named Christians. Many people, including many Christians, had worried that the administration would limit the finding to Yazidis and leave out the Christians. It did not.
2. It named a perpetrator and a territory. The determination was about the Islamic State's conduct in areas it controlled, not about a general condition.
3. It put the government formally on record. Whatever one thinks of the politics, the Secretary of State had used the word in an official statement, as Powell had done over Darfur in 2004.

A determination of genocide does not, by itself, trigger a military intervention. The Genocide Convention obliges parties to prevent and punish the crime, and states differ about what that requires. In practice the label opens doors: to sanctions, to evidence-gathering, to prosecutions and to aid for survivors. It also makes it harder for the government to look away.

The steelman and the answer

Some critics argued, in 2016 and after, that the declaration was either too much or too little. State the objections at their strongest.

The skeptic of the label says: "Genocide is a word with a very specific legal meaning, and it should be used sparingly. The Islamic State committed horrific atrocities, but proving intent to destroy each group as such is hard, and over-using the word cheapens it."

The impatient critic says: "The declaration came late, after the worst had happened, and it was words, not action. Thousands of people were already dead or enslaved."

Both deserve an answer, in numbered points.

1. On the label. The perpetrators advertised their intent. A group that publishes its plan to enslave a religious community, and carries it out, has done more than most to establish the intent element. The legal definition was met on the record, not stretched to cover it.
2. On timing. The criticism is fair as far as it goes: the declaration came about two years after the Sinjar assault. But the delay is an argument for faster action next time, not against the finding.
3. On words versus action. A formal finding is not an end in itself. It is a precondition for the things that follow: investigations, prosecutions and aid. A government that refuses to name the crime has also refused the remedies.

What came afterward

The finding set off a series of consequences, some satisfying and some not.

Congress followed the declaration with legislation. In December 2018 the Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act was signed into law, directing American support to survivors of genocide and to efforts to collect evidence for prosecution, and it was passed with bipartisan support. The act was prompted by the finding of 2016 and by continued advocacy from religious groups. The United Nations Security Council, in 2017, established an investigative team to collect evidence of ISIS crimes in Iraq, and investigators later reported that evidence of genocide against the Yazidis was clear and convincing. Nadia Murad, a Yazidi survivor of ISIS captivity who became an advocate for her community, shared the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

On the ground, the picture is mixed, and I will not invent a statistic. The territorial caliphate was later broken up by a coalition of forces. But many of those who fled, Christians and Yazidis alike, have not returned, because their towns are damaged, their security is uncertain and their trust is broken. Reconstruction aid, protection for returnees and prosecutions have all moved slower than survivors hoped. A reader who wants current numbers should consult recent State Department and USCIRF reports, because I am not going to quote figures that I cannot verify.

What religious-freedom advocacy achieved

Here is the lesson that conservatives should take, and it is an encouraging one. The 2016 finding did not come from the government's own initiative. It came from citizens, churches, congregations and a few members of Congress who refused to let the matter rest.

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 had created the machinery: a commission, an ambassador and an annual report that kept the facts on the record. The 1998 law that put religious persecution on America's foreign agenda explains how it works. Documentation, the unanimous House vote and a Secretary of State's finding followed from that structure. This is how self-government is supposed to work, when citizens read the record, organize and press their representatives.

It also corrects a lazy narrative. The claim that "America created ISIS" or that everything is the West's fault does not survive contact with the evidence, and Rebutting the Claim That America Created ISIS and Every Other Enemy takes it apart. A culture that cannot say plainly that a group committed genocide against a religious minority, and name the group, is a culture that has lost its moral vocabulary.

The same habit of naming persecution matters in other cases, from the Ottoman destruction of Christian communities in 1915, covered in 1915, the Armenian genocide and the Christian peoples who perished with them, to the modern control of churches in China, described in How China's Communist Party licenses churches and jails pastors.

What the Founding says

The Declaration of Independence rests on the claim that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," among them "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These are not American rights; they are human rights, and the document is addressed to "a candid world." The Founders did not suppose that the United States could police the globe, and George Washington's Farewell Address, with its advice to steer clear of permanent alliances, is a good reminder of the limits. But they did not suppose that the moral claim of the Declaration stopped at the border either.

The Founders' own record is worth a look. In 1790 Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport that the government of the United States "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." To bigotry no sanction, Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport reads that letter closely. A country that holds that principle should be able to say, without apology, when a regime or a militia has crossed the line into extermination.

The case in brief

1. Genocide, as defined in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, is the commission of listed acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.
2. In August 2014 ISIS attacked the Yazidis at Sinjar and drove Christians from the Nineveh Plain, and its own propaganda and conduct supplied the evidence of intent.
3. The House passed a resolution on March 14, 2016, by 393 to 0, and Secretary of State Kerry made the formal finding of genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims on March 17, 2016.
4. The finding opened the way to legislation in 2018, to investigations and prosecutions and to aid, though many survivors have not been able to return home.
5. The result shows that documentation, citizen pressure and a statute that keeps persecution on the record can change what a government is willing to say.

What you can do: read your own member of Congress's record on the Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act at Congress.gov, then write to ask what oversight of its funding the member supports.