John Kerry Calls ISIS Actions Genocide

" Last year, Yazidi activists worked with Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to petition the world body on the question of genocide.

They filed a 49-page report, after a field visit by Mr. Moreno-Ocampo to northern Iraq, where he met women who had been raped by fighters, and survivors of massacres.

“Even though they did not kill the entire group, they are removing the group from its lands, so the group is terminated because they can no longer live in their homeland,” Mr. Moreno-Ocampo said in an interview last year. “The intent is enough, because the intention was to destroy. This is a perfect example of genocide.”

He said he had met numerous victims who had described how the Islamic State had immediately separated the men from the women when it invaded their villages on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq in 2014. Men were executed on the spot, while women were herded into waiting buses, before being driven to buildings that served as holding pens for the enslaved women.

In addition, Yazidi captives including children were forced to convert at gunpoint, and nearly the entire community was forcibly displaced from its traditional homeland on the Sinjar.

On Thursday, Mr. Kerry made it clear that accusations of genocide, crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing against specific people “must be brought to light by an independent investigation and through formal legal determinations made by a competent court or tribunal.”