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Stories from Iraq are chilling. ISIL has set up “sex-slave markets,” where girls literally have their teeth checked before being sold. ISIL terrorists bid on captured Yazidi girls as if they were cattle. The girls are regularly beaten, whipped, burned, and raped. This is disturbing and heartbreaking. In 2016, it cannot be tolerated.

Not only is ISIL committing unspeakable crimes against humanity, the jihadists have deliberately destroyed dozens of historical religious sites and looted the their artifacts. Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, has called this despicable vandalism “cultural cleansing.”

These are not the actions of a mere “criminal organization,” as the Liberal government suggests. ISIL has much larger aims than criminal enterprise or personal profit. Its stated goal is to create a new caliphate across the Middle East and beyond, to impose Shariah law on all its territories, and to wage war against the West, including Canada.

Yet Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, Stéphane Dion, has avoided calling these actions genocide. He has said in the House of Commons that he wants to “investigate” whether or not genocide has taken place.

While Dion stalls, Canada’s allies have responded. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said that ISIL “is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control.” On March 15, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously declared that genocide was taking place in Iraq and Syria by ISIL. The House of Commons in the United Kingdom followed suit and voted unanimously to recognize that Christians, Yazidis and other ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and Syria were suffering genocide at the hands of ISIL. Furthermore, United Nations investigators have accused ISIL of committing genocide. Their evidence clearly suggests that ISIL intends to “destroy the Yazidi as a group.” In just one example, the UN found that ISIL fighters rounded up hundreds of Yazidi men over the age of 14 and summarily executed them.