114TH CONGRESS 
2D SESSION 
H. CON. RES. 75 
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION 
Whereas Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities 
have been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the 
Middle East for millennia; 
Whereas the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant 
(ISIL) and associated extremists are committing egre-
gious atrocities against ethnic and religious minorities in 
Iraq 
and 
Syria, 
including 
Christians
•HCON 75 EH 
(including Assyrian Chaldean Syriac, Armenian, and 
Melkite communities, among others), Yezidis, Turkmen, 
Shabak, Sabaean-Mandeans, and Kaka‘i, among others; 
Whereas ISIL specifically targets these religious and ethnic 
minorities, intending to kill them or force their submis-
sion, conversion, or expulsion; 
Whereas religious and ethnic minorities have been murdered, 
subjugated, forced to emigrate, and subjected to grievous 
bodily and psychological harm, kidnapping, human traf-
ficking, torture, and rape; 
Whereas ISIL engages in, and publicly argues in favor of, the 
sexual enslavement of non-Muslim women, including pre- 
pubescent girls; 
Whereas ISIL atrocities against Christians, Yezidis, and 
other minorities have included mass murder, crucifixions, 
beheadings, rape, torture, enslavement, the kidnaping of 
children, and other violence deliberately calculated to 
eliminate their communities from the so-called Islamic 
State; 
Whereas ISIL has deliberately destroyed and looted numer-
ous cultural sites, religious shrines, churches, mon-
asteries, and museums in order to eradicate the cultures 
of ethnic and religious minorities from the territory it at-
tempts to control; 
Whereas these atrocities have been undertaken with the spe-
cific intent to bring about the eradication of those com-
munities and the destruction of their cultural heritage; 
Whereas ISIL operations have in fact driven minority reli-
gious and ethnic communities from their ancestral home-
lands;
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Whereas under applicable international law referenced in sec-
tion 2441 of Title 18 of the United States Code, murder, 
torture, mutilation, rape, cruel treatment, and hostage- 
taking of non-combatants constitute war crimes; 
Whereas crimes against humanity, as defined by the Inter-
national Military Tribunal convened at Nuremberg in 
1945, and in various international instruments since 
then, include murder, extermination, enslavement, depor-
tation, and other inhumane acts committed against any 
civilian population, as well as persecution on political, ra-
cial, or religious grounds in connection with such crimes; 
Whereas the United Nations Convention on the Prevention 
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, signed and 
ratified by the United States, defines genocide as ‘‘any 
of the following acts committed with the intent to de-
stroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or 
religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the 
group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to 
members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the 
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its 
physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing 
measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) 
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another 
group’’; 
Whereas on August 7, 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry 
declared that ‘‘ISIL’s campaign of terror against the in-
nocent, including Yezidi and Christian minorities, and its 
grotesque and targeted acts of violence bear all the warn-
ing signs and hallmarks of genocide’’; 
Whereas in August 2014, the United States conducted tar-
geted airstrikes and humanitarian assistance operations
•HCON 75 EH 
to help break the siege of Mount Sinjar, saving the lives 
of thousands of Yezidi men, women, and children; 
Whereas His Holiness, Pope Francis, has noted that ‘‘entire 
communities, especially—but not only—Christians and 
Yezidis have suffered and are still suffering inhuman vio-
lence because of their ethnic and religious identity’’ and 
that, for Christians being killed for their faith in the 
Middle East, ‘‘a form of genocide—I insist on the word— 
is taking place, and it must end’’; 
Whereas a March 13, 2015, report by the Office of the 
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 
detailed ‘‘acts of violence perpetrated [by ISIL] against 
civilians because of their affiliation or perceived affili-
ation to an ethnic or religious group’’ and stated that 
‘‘[i]t is reasonable to conclude that some of these inci-
dents, considering the overall information, may constitute 
genocide’’; 
Whereas in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Com-
mittee on May 13, 2015, Dominican Sister Diana 
Momeka, whose convent was driven from Mosul, Iraq, de-
scribed the ISIL offensive as ‘‘cultural and human geno-
cide’’ and stated that today ‘‘[t]he only Christians that 
remain in the Plain of Nineveh are those who are held 
as hostages’’; 
Whereas in December 2015, the United States Holocaust Me-
morial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention 
of Genocide issued a report focused on the treatment of 
minorities in Nineveh from June to August 2014, which 
found that ISIL had ‘‘targeted civilians based on group 
identity, committing mass atrocities to control, expel, and 
exterminate ethnic and religious minorities’’ and, in that 
context, ‘‘committed crimes against humanity, war