“The deaths and escaping of Rohingya Muslims from their homeland, Myanmar, is a full-blown genocide in the twenty-first-century world,” the Assyrian Association of Tehran said in a statement released on Monday.
“The world’s Assyrian community, which itself has suffered the bitter taste of genocide in past centuries, believes that these savage crimes should be stopped,” the statement added.
It went on to condemn the crackdown on the Rohingya and express sympathies with the victims of the violence and world Muslims.
The Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have long faced severe discrimination and were the targets of violence in 2012 that killed hundreds and drove about 140,000 people from their homes to camps for the internally displaced.
On September 12, the UN refugee agency said the number of Rohingya Muslim refugees that have fled recent violence in Myanmar has spiked to about 370,000.
Earlier, the UN top human rights official accused Myanmar of carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against Rohingya Muslims.
Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said the military’s “brutal” security campaign was in clear violation of international law, and cited what he called refugees’ consistent accounts of widespread extrajudicial killings, rape, and other atrocities.