ICC Note:Tom Gallagher recently sat down and interviewed a displaced Iraqi Christian husband and father of 11. The man recounted his experience with the Islamic State and the circumstances Christians and Yazidis face in his home country. The plight of these people is dire indeed. The world seems to be less concerned today since this is no new information. The continuing suffering should concern us more, because these people have been with no respite.

05/25/2016 Iraq (Greenwich Times): “Daesh is not human being,” said Dominic, a displaced Iraqi Christian husband and father of 11, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group, during my recent trip to Erbil, Iraq. “Their minds are affected. All they want is to kill, kill, kill, war, war, war.”

And “kill and war” is what ISIS does. So much so that on March 17,U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the killing of Christians, Yezidis and Shia Muslims in Iraq and Syria to be genocide.

Kerry minced no words.

“Daesh is genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology, and by actions — in what it says, what it believes, and what it does Daesh captured and enslaved thousands of Yezidi women and girls — selling them at auction, raping them at will, and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations.

ISIS has killed Christians “solely for their faith” and forced Christian women and girls into sexual slavery, said Kerry. Christians have been in Iraq since the first century.

Kerry came to the genocide determination based on a review of a “vast” amount of information gathered by the State Department, the U.S. intelligence community, and by outside groups, including New Haven, Conn.-based Knights of Columbus who funded and submitted a 280-page report documenting the genocide. (This writer is a member of the Knights of Columbus.)

On June 5, 2014, ISIS attacked the city of Mosul, triggering a massive exodus of Christians and religious minorities. Two months later ISIS attacked nearby city of Qaraqosh, the largest Christian city in Iraq, and emptied it of some 50,000 Christians, who fled on foot, in cars and on donkeys and traveled 45 miles to the Ankawa district in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region. There they lived outdoors, some in tents, others finding shelter in abandoned half-built structures, a true humanitarian disaster.

One group of women religious, the Iraqi Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, who themselves were displaced from Mosul, Qaraqosh and surrounding villages, got busy organizing and handing out diapers and milk to young mothers and infants, and later creating an elementary school, religious education programs and offering hope to the people.

As a direct result of the ISIS attacks, the trauma of the flight from Qaraqosh directly contributed to the death of 23 elderly Dominican Sisters, ages 70 to 75, who died of heart failure.

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