Third World War

There are many memorable lines in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic, but one that has always stuck me is when Captain Benjamin Willard, the millitary assassin played by Martin Sheen, reflects on the savagery of the conflict and the apparent futility of attempting to enforce any civilised standards. "Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing outspeeding tickets in the Indy 500," he observes in a saturnine moment of near despair.

This would be an equally apposite reflection if applied to the awful violence today in Syria and Iraq, two theatres of what Pope Francis has referred to as a "Third World War" and one in which crimes against humanity are being committed on all sides.

Brutal conflict
The 2015 annual report of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom open a vivid and deeply depressing picture of just how complex and merciless this conflict has now become.

The regime of President Bashar Al-Assad, it tells us, is guilty of extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, using chemical weapons, indiscrimiznate shelling of civilian sites, including mosques and churches, and withholding food and other aid. But the so-called 'moderate' Free Syrian Army  and its affiliates fare little better: the report blames them for the massacre of Shia Muslims civilians, and says they work with Islamist terror groups, making it often impossible for the West, and Russia, to differentiate be tween which fighters are really jihadists and which are not.

Be in no doubt that these rebels are bloody: Abu Sakkar, the founder of the Farouq Brigades, a Homs-based offshoot of the Free Syrian Army, was in 2013 filmed cutting out the heart of a dead Syrian soldier and taking a bite from it while cursing Assad. How could anybody really be surprised when a rebel shot dead a Russian bomber pilot as he floated earthwards after his plane was blasted out of the sky by a Turkish missile?

Atrocities also continue unabated in 'liberated' Iraq, meanwhile, where Shia militias like the Badr Brigades and the Mahdi Army have carried out mass killings of Sunni civilians, and where the government also stands accused of extra-judicial killings and torture among a list of other human rights abuses.

A death cult
Amid all these carnage one group stands out for the scale and barbarity of its actions, and that, of course, is Islamic State, the ultra- violent Sunni terror group willing to kill anyone opposed to its horrifying and apocalyptic interpretation of Islam. Beheadings, burnings, crucifixions, and the occasional throwing of homosexuals to their deaths from great heights are among the crimes committed by these well-armed, well-funded, well-organised, and highly-motivated terrorists. They have also shown themselves capable of exporting shocking violence to the cafe bars of Paris and the beaches of Tunisia, and even blew up a Russian airliner over the Sinnai Desert, killing 224 holiday-makers at a stroke. It is no wonder that an international coalition has emerged, dedicated to the destruction of this death cult.

Of all the crimes of which Islamic State is accused, the most grave is that of genocide, and the victims of this alleged crime are principally the Christians of Iraq and Syria, along with other minority religious groups such as the Yazidis.

The crime of genocide
The word 'genocide' usually conjures up images of the Nazi death camps in which millions of European Jews perished during the Holocaust, and the abominable slaughter of nearly a million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Christian leaders across the Middle East began to use the term in 2014 to describe the plight of their people as they were driven from their homes at the point of Islamic State swords to cluster on their tens of thousands in refugee camps along the borders of territory controlled by the terrorists.

The view of the bishops of the region is shared by Pope Francis, who remarked in July that 'today we are dismayed to see how in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world many of our brothers and sisters are persecuted, tortured, and killed for their faith in Jesus... a form of genocide is taking place, and it must end."

Genocide of course, is not just a word to be bandied around when mass murder is committed. It is defined by International Law. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide refers to genocide as acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Such acts might include mass murder, serious bodily or mental harm against members of the group, the deliberate creation of conditions to bring about the destruction of the group, the imposition of measures to prevent births among the group, and the transfer of children from the group to elsewhere.

White House inaction
At present there is an international campaign under way to persuade the United Nations to recognise the persecution of Middle East Christians as genocide. The purposes are to ensure that the international community acts swiftly to end the genocide; that victims of the genocide are given priority refugee status, and to bring the perpetrators to Nuremberg-style justice after the conflict is over.

But the campaign is meeting resistance from political-leaders in the West. This surfaced in December when more than 30 US religious leaders wrote a letter of protest to John Kerry, US Secretary of State, after the Obama administration indicated its willingness to recognise the genocide of Yazid is - but not of Christians.

They told him they had "extensive files" that included "evidence of ISIS (Islamic State) assassinations of Church leaders, mass murders, torture, kidnapping for ransom in the Christian communities of Iraq and Syria, its sexual enslavement and systematic rape of Christian girls and women, its practices of forcible conversions to Islam, its destruction of churches, monasteries, cemeteries, and Christian artefacts, and its theft of lands and wealth from Christian clergy and laity alike.

"We will also present ISIS' own public statements taking 'credit' for mass murder of Christians, and expressing its intent to eliminate Christian communities from its 'Islamic State'", said the letter, which was cosigned by Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl.

Although President Barack Obama remains unconvinced by this appeal, Hillary Clinton, the Democrat presidential candidate, announced over Christmas that she now believed there was sufficient evidence to recognise the genocide of Middle East Christians.

Mrs Clinton is not alone: fellow presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee and Martin O'Malley have also expressed the same opinion, while a Marist Poll in the US found that about 55 percent of respondents agreed that the ISIS persecution of Christians and other religious minorities met the UN definition of genocide, with just 36% disagreeing.

Catholic resistance
Yet even within the Catholic Church it is possible to hear voices dissenting from the genocide argument on other grounds.

Father Thomas Reece the admired American Jesuit, is a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a group which on December 7 urged President Obama to recognise the genocide of Christians by ISIS. Three days later, Father Reece departed from the opinions of the Commission in a blog for the National Catholic Reporter.

He argued that it would be a mistake to give priority to the protection of Christians and other religious minorities when ISIS was slaughtering and displacing moderate Muslims perhaps in even greater numbers.

"All who suffer persecution deserve our compassion and help", he wrote. "Singling out one group of refugees, say Christians, for special treatment is not consistent with either our American or Christian values. All refugees are our brothers and sisters deserving of our support. In addition, singling out Christians for help plays into the Islamic State group's apocalyptic narrative that this is a struggle to the death between Islam and Christendom. If the West appears to be only interested in helping Christians, it will make matters worse for Christians in the Middle East and will make it difficult to get the allies we need to defeat the Islamic State group."

No one can doubt the sincerity of Fr. Recee's opinion, but for Lord Alton if represents another "argument for doing nothing."

Disagreements over what to call the plight of the Christians of the Middle East may continue for some time to come. There will also belots of discussions about who should stand trial and on what grounds. Yet in the meantime, Christians from Aleppo to Kirkuk remain so scared and desperate that they continue to flee their countries: a 2015 report by Aid to the Church in Need called Persecuted and Forgotten? predicted that in as little as five years their presence could be lost from Iraq and that they could also vanish from Syria within the space of a decade.

One day both the wars and the talking will be over. By then, the world might also have turned to the question of how the elimination of these ancient and noble Christians communities was ever allowed to happen.