ICC Note: As Christians and other minorities have faced some of the most severe and targeted attacks in recent history, Forty members of Congress are pushing for recognition of these events as genocide. Entire communities have been erased of a population that once numbered more than 100,000 across Mosul and the Nineveh Plains.
09/11/2015 Middle East (Daily Caller) Forty members of Congress have endorsed a resolution condemning Islamic State’s persecution of Christians as genocide.
Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, a Republican from Nebraska, introduced the bill Wednesday. A congressional source told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the number of co-sponsoring representatives reached 40 by Friday, and that there is also interest in the Senate.
Representatives backing the concurrent resolution come from both parties. The leading Democrat on the bill is Anna Eshoo, a California member whose parents both fled earlier waves of Christian persecution in the Middle East. At a press event Thursday, Eshoo lamented that “the story of my family and why history is repeating itself.”
When the jihadis stormed through northern Iraq’s Christian heartland last summer, they systematically uprooted a community that had lived there for the better part of 2,000 years. They gave families the choice between death, conversion and an impossibly steep tax, so many tens of thousands left their homes behind with nothing. Since then, reports have also emerged of Islamic State’s systematic rape and enslavement of non-Muslim minorities.
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