President Obama ordered the military operation against the self-proclaimed Islamic State because the Sunni militant group targets anyone who doesn’t subscribe to its perverted version of Islam, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Thursday.
Earnest was addressing Secretary of State John Kerry’s declaration that the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or Daesh, is committing genocide against Christians and other religious minorities.
Obama “has talked on a number of occasions about how this is deeply troubling and is an affront to every person of faith,” Earnest explained. “That is why the president has ordered military actions against ISIL in Iraq and in Syria. In some cases, there have been military actions that have been ordered specifically to protect religious minorities,” he said, referring to 2014’s rescue of Yazidis from Mount Sinjar.
The Kurdish religious group was fleeing Islamic State persecution and got trapped on the mountain on the Iraq-Syria border.
“There’s also a less prominent example [where] ISIL fighters that were carrying out a siege in the Iraqi town of Amirli, where there are an estimated 15,000 Turkmen Shia, surrounded by ISIL fighters,” Earnest said.
“And again, the United States took military action to break that siege,” he continued. “So, the United States has, on the orders of the commander-in-chief, taken steps to try to protect religious minorities in that region of the world from being the victims of violence at the hands of ISIL.”
Earnest said that U.S. forces have done the same for Christians.
Kerry’s designation “is significant, it reflects the gravity of the situation there and it’s one that continues to attract the attention, not just of the United States, but it’s also why the United States has been able to build a strong, moral cases against ISIL and build a substantial international coalition of 66 nations to degrade and ultimately destroy that terrorist organization,” Earnest said.
“The United States will support efforts to collect, document, preserve and analyze the evidence of atrocities,” he said. “And the United States will do all we can to ensure that perpetrators of these atrocities are held to account and bought to justice.”
