A petition with more than 400,000 signatures from citizens all over the world was recently submitted at the U.N. headquarters in New York calling on the Security Council to formally declare the persecution of Christians and other minorities in Syria and Iraq as genocide.
Religious leaders like Nigerian Bishop Joseph Danlami Bagobiri and Archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart of Aleppo, Syria joined representatives of the advocacy group CitizenGO outside the U.N. in New York last week to press the Security Council to "take a step forward to protect Christians and other religious minorities that live there" in order for religious freedom to prevail in that part of the world.
"So we are here to support our brothers and sisters, Christians and other believers that are suffering persecution, that are suffering killings, that are suffering discrimination in this part of the world, the Middle East," said Ignacio Arsuaga, president of CitizenGO, the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reports.
According to him, the petition that was submitted to the office of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon specifically asked the U.N. chief to pressure the council to declare genocide for Christians and other religious victims of the Islamic State (ISIS) and "to enforce mechanisms to protect genocide victims and prosecute the persecutors."
It likewise called on member nations to act "to stop the war in Syria" as well as help internally-displaced persons in Iraq and Syria return to their homes.
The petition also proposed that "safe havens" for internally displaced persons should be created, as well as an "action plan to rescue kidnapped and enslaved Christian and Yazidi women and girls."
Christians make up 80 percent of minority victims of religious persecution. They have left Iraq and Syria in droves since the civil war erupted in the Middle East, the Call to Action group says.
The petition stated: "Christians, Yazidis, and other minorities are victims of the deliberate infliction of life conditions that are calculated to bring about their physical destruction by the so-called 'ISIS': They are being murdered, beheaded, crucified, beaten, extorted, abducted, and tortured."
"Women and children have also been enslaved, women have been raped and trafficked, children have been forcibly recruited, and churches and communities have been destroyed," the report says.
In Nigeria, Christians have been targeted by the terror group Boko Haram. Over 4,000 have been killed and almost 200 churches have been damaged or destroyed since 2015, according to the group Open Doors.
Archbishop Jeanbart told CNA that it is so important for the U.N. to take action on the issue because the church of the first Christian is already collapsing.
"We are undergoing a real genocide," he said of his diocese in Aleppo, "and we are afraid that they want to take us out of our life, but also of our country, of the place where we were born, where the Church was born."
"There are two kinds of genocide, human genocide and Church genocide. Not only are people dying, but the Church itself is "disappearing" from Syria, he said.
According to the archbishop, the first Syrian Christians were Jews from the Diaspora who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem at the time of the Pentecost and were among the 3,000 baptised by Peter and the Apostles.
The U.S. State Department, the British House of Commons, and the European Union Parliament have already declared that genocide is taking place in Iraq and Syria. Multiple U.N. advisory bodies have likewise stated that genocide is taking place in Syria and Iraq, CNA reports.
