Hillary Clinton has put her weight behind a campaign to recognise the persecution of Iraqi and Syrian Christians by Islamist extremists as genocide. The US Democrat presidential candidate told a meeting in New Hampshire that she believed there was “enough evidence” to prove that the scale of violence committed against religious minorities by ISIS terrorists constituted a campaign of genocide. Her remarks were hailed as a breakthrough by a group of 75 British MPs and peers who earlier this month signed a letter to David Cameron asking him to declare the crimes of ISIS as genocide. “That the US Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, has now gone on public record that there is ‘now enough evidence’ that the killings by ISIS constitute genocide is a huge boost to our campaign,” said Lord Alton of Liverpool and Robert Flello, Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, in a joint statement on behalf of the signatories. “As former US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton knows the Middle East well and her backing for our position sends a very clear signal to the United Nations that it should determine that genocide is indeed being perpetrated,” they said. “This will require the now 147 signatories to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide to act to end this persecution and to ensure that in due course its perpetrators are caught, tried and punished for their evil crimes.” The declaration by Mrs Clinton represents a U-turn because she was previously reluctant to use the word “genocide” to describe the ISIS campaign against Christians, Yazidis, non-Sunni Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities. She announced her change of heart when a voter asked her last week: “Will you join those leaders, faith leaders and secular leaders and political leaders from both the right and the left, in calling what is happening by its proper name, genocide?” “I will because we now have enough evidence,” replied Mrs Clinton. She added that she was convinced the violence was “deliberately aimed at destroying not only the lives but wiping out the existence of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East”. In Britain, the Prime Minister earlier this month came under similar pressure when MPs and peers presented him with a letter telling him there was sufficient proof of the systematic persecution of minorities that was aimed at their annihilation. They urged Mr Cameron to recognise the slaughter as genocide in an attempt to persuade those countries that have signed up to the Convention of their duty to halt the killings and to bring the perpetrators to justice. “There is now clear evidence that this genocide includes assassinations of Church leaders, mass murders, torture, kidnapping for ransom in the Christian communities of Iraq and Syria, sexual enslavement and systematic rape of Christian girls and women, forcible conversions to Islam, destruction of churches, monasteries, cemeteries and Christian artefacts, and theft of lands and wealth from Christian clergy and laity alike,” the letter said.