GENOCIDE, THE ISLAMIC STATE AND REFUGEES

Since the Holocaust, the United States has designated wide-scale killing as genocide only four times: Cambodia in 1989, Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994 and Sudan in 2004. To those it has now added the Islamic State’s rampage in Iraq and Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry announced Thursday.

Using an Arabic term for the group, Kerry said that “Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims.”

The term genocide, first specified in the 1948 U. N. Convention, refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The evidence against the Islamic State is indisputable.

In 2014, the group killed hundreds of Yazidi men and older women, members of an ancient sect branded as pagans by the militants, in the Iraqi town of Kocho. Thousands of others were trapped on Mount Sinjar without food or water, until America intervened. As The Times reported, Islamic State fighters have used rape as an act of war and kidnapped and imprisoned Yazidi women as sex slaves.

Kerry also accused the Islamic State of crimes against Sunni Muslims and Kurds, executing Christians in Iraq and Coptic and Ethiopian Christians in Libya, enslaving Christian women and girls, and systematically destroying the cultural heritage of the Armenian, Syrian Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities.

Kerry cited evidence of the Islamic State massacring hundreds of Shiite Turkmen and Shabaks at Tal Afar and Mosul in Iraq; besieging and starving the Turkmen town of Amerli and kidnapping and raping Shiite Turkmen women. “The fact is that Daesh kills Christians because they are Christians; Yazidis because they are Yazidis; Shia because they are Shia,” he said.

The Obama administration was urged to make the genocide designation by Christian groups, the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, United to End Genocide and others. These groups also took their case to the House of Representatives, which passed a separate resolution Monday condemning the Islamic State for trying to wipe out ethnic groups in territories it seizes.

That resolution gave more prominence to atrocities against Christians and Yazidis. Kerry made it very clear Thursday that Muslims, too, are endangered by the militants.

The State Department said the designation does not impose any new legal requirements on the United States, which is pummeling the Islamic State with airstrikes and other military operations. But it should make Congress more willing to allow Syrian refugees who are the survivors of this genocide to find safe harbor in the United States.