Former U.S. White House Chief of Staff John Sununu has said in an interview that President Barack Obama seems  "indifferent" to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.

During an appearance on "The Cats Roundtable," a radio show on AM 970 in New York on Aug. 9, Sununu said Americans need to keep pressuring their congressmen and senators to "talk some sense into the president."

"It's a tragedy what's happening," Sununu, a Republican who was born in Cuba, told host John Catsimatidis, The Hill reported.

"And I cannot believe that this administration, this president, does not understand that there is a concerted effort to destroy the Christian community in Iraq, the Christian community in Syria in particular, and they're being slaughtered."

Sununu, who comes from Greek Orthodox family with roots in the Middle East, said there are tens of thousands of Christians being killed.

"There seems to be an indifference in Washington to what is happening there," he said. "These are not trivial numbers."

Sununu served as New Hampshire's 75th governor and White House chief of staff during the George W. Bush administration.

His stance was borne out by Democrat presidential contender and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, the Daily Caller reported Aug. 7.

O'Malley said the group calling itself Islamic State is trying to wipe Christians off the face of the Earth, and the United States isn't doing enough to stop them.

"ISIS' plan to destroy Christianity in the Middle East is more ambitious than simply wiping out the Christian population; it also aspires to erase any semblance that Christianity ever existed in the Middle East," O'Malley wrote in an editorial in the Detroit Free Press.

"'Genocide' is not an overstatement," he added, saying ISIS' violence against Christians "requires an extraordinary effort on our part to protect them."

O'Malley pointed to ISIS beheading and murdering of Christians. ISIS has destroyed churches and forced Christians it doesn't execute to pay a tax for not converting to Islam.