The Dae’sh militant group has committed genocide against minority Christians and Yazidis as well as Shia Muslims, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday, a finding that is unlikely to greatly change US policy toward the group.
“The fact is that Dae’sh kills Christians because they are Christians. Yazidis because they are Yazidis. Shias because they are Shias,” Kerry said, and accusing it of crimes against humanity and of ethnic cleansing.
US lawmakers urged Kerry last year to make a determination on whether atrocities committed by the militant group against Christians and other religious groups amounted to genocide. This week the House of Representatives passed a resolution labeling the group’s violence against religious and ethnic minorities as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
While the genocide finding may make it easier for the US to argue for greater action against the group, it does not create a legal obligation on the US to do more.
On Wednesday, a State Department spokesman Mark Toner said: “Acknowledging that genocide or crimes against humanity have taken place in another country would not necessarily result in any particular legal obligation for the United States.”
Dae’sh group’s videos depict the violent deaths of people who stand in its way. Opponents have been beheaded, shot dead, blown up with fuses attached to their necks and drowned in cages lowered into swimming pools, with underwater cameras capturing their agony.
US President Barack Obama has ordered air strikes against the group but has not made any large commitment of US troops on the ground.
Kerry argued that the US has done much to fight the group since the start of air strikes in 2014, but did not directly answer a question on why the Obama administration had not done more to prevent genocide.
Historians have asked the same question about Darfur and Rwanda, both places where the US also concluded that genocide had taken place.
Dae’sh militants have exploited the five-year civil war in Syria to seize areas in that country and in neighboring Iraq, though U.S. officials say their air strikes have markedly reduced the amount of territory the group controls in both.
On-again, off-again peace talks got under way this week in Geneva in an effort to end the civil war, in which at least 250,000 people have died and millions have fled their homes. A fragile “cessation of hostilities” has reduced, but not ended, the violence over the last two weeks.