The leading US Democratic candidate has said she believes ISIS’ campaign against Christians constitutes genocide.
Hillary Clinton was asked at a New Hampshire meeting whether she would join faith and secular leaders from across the political divide “in calling what is happening by its proper name, genocide”.
She replied that she would do so “because we now have enough evidence,” adding that ISIS’ violence was “deliberately aimed at destroying not only the lives but wiping out the existence of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East”.
Mrs Clinton had previously been loath to describe as genocide the ISIS campaign against Christians, Yazidis, non-Sunni Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities.
A group of 75 British politicians have hailed this development and called on UK Prime Minister David Cameron to do likewise.
Lord Alton of Liverpool and Robert Flello, Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, said in a joint statement on behalf of the group that Mrs Clinton’s comments were “a huge boost” to their campaign for the Prime Minister to recognise ISIS’ actions as genocide.
“As former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton knows the Middle East well and her backing for our position sends a very clear signal to the United Nations that it should determine that genocide is indeed being perpetrated,” they continued.
The Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need claimed in a report last month that persecution is driving Christians from Syria and Iraq so rapidly that they might disappear from those countries within five years.
