A statement by the British Foreign Office stated that the United Kingdom officially recognized this Tuesday “that ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidis in 2014.”
The British government considered on Tuesday that practices committed by the Islamic State organization against the Yazidis in 2014 in Iraq constitute “genocide”, according to what the British Foreign Office announced in a statement.
The statement, which was published on the government’s official website, reads: “The United Kingdom today formally acknowledged that ISIS committed genocidal practices against the Yazidis in 2014.”
In the past, the UK government has condemned ISIS atrocities against the Yazidis, but those condemnations have stopped short of recognizing these crimes as genocide.
The UK has long had a policy that these matters should be decided by the High Criminal Courts and not by the government.
“Today we have made a historic recognition that acts of genocide have been committed against the Yazidi people,” Tariq Ahmed, British Minister of State for the Middle East, said.
The government statement added that the United Kingdom officially recognizes five cases of genocide, namely the Holocaust [الهولوكوست] Rwanda, Srebrenica and the genocide in Cambodia and against the Yazidi people.
More than 6,000 Yazidis were kidnapped when ISIS attacked their stronghold in Nineveh province, according to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Office for the Rescue of Kidnapped Yazidis.
More than 2,000 are still missing.
According to the office, more than 120,000 Yazidis have fled Iraq since ISIS launched its attack, and tens of thousands of those who remain in the region live in camps.
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2023-08-01 09:45:00