London: Britain’s government on Tuesday formally declared that atrocities committed by the Islamic State group against the Yazidi people in Iraq were acts of genocide.
The UK Foreign Office said the government’s official acknowledgement came after a recent landmark ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice, which found a former member of IS, also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Britain previously gave official acknowledgement of four other instances in which genocide occurred, including the Holocaust; in Cambodia during the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge, the 1994 mass ethnic killings in Rwanda; and the 1995 massacre of men and boys in and near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. “The Yazidi population suffered immensely at the hands of Daesh nine years ago, and the repercussions are still felt to this day,” Tariq Ahmad, the UK’s minister of state for the Middle East.agencie