The New York Times on Thursday reported that the Trump administration is preparing to oust Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in the coming weeks. The White House and the State Department denied the story, which was sourced to unnamed senior administration officials. “Secretary Tillerson enjoys this job,” a State spokesperson told reporters. “He has a lot of work to do.” Even so, rumors of Tillerson’s imminent departure have been swirling in Washington for months. The former Exxon Mobil CEO reportedly takes a dim view of Donald Trump, and the president has in turn undercut Tillerson’s diplomacy with his wild tweeting on more than one occasion.

So it is a good time to assess Tillerson’s tenure at Foggy Bottom. Trump’s antics loom large over his whole cabinet, and, in Tillerson’s case especially, it is hard to think of signature achievements. But the secretary did make positive contributions all the same.

Along with National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Chief of Staff John Kelly, Tillerson was one of the adults in the room when the administration was dominated by Breitbart hotheads such as former advisers Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. Tillerson’s even-tempered approach no doubt reassured U.S. friends alarmed by Trump’s disdain for alliances, unseemly Putin bromance, and bull-in-a-china-shop tendencies. Tillerson helped marshal support for the decertification of the Iran deal (though so far the administration has mostly failed to make good on its vows to get tough on the mullahs). His State Department also deserves praise for pulling the U.S. from the virulently anti-Israel UNESCO, even if it was a minor step in the grand scheme of things.

But Tillerson’s most meaningful and lasting contribution has been his strong stand on the persecution of Yazidis, Christians, and other ethnic and sectarian minorities in Iraq.

I was reminded of this at a recent lunch with Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil. The archbishop was in New York to raise awareness of Iraq’s endangered Christians. These indigenous communities survived the ravages of Islamic State (ISIS) after the terror outfit overran northern Iraq in 2014. ISIS “gave us three options,” the archbishop said: “convert, jizya [living under a permanent state of terror and extortion] or killing us.” Too often, local Muslims turned against Christians and took advantage of the ISIS invasion to expropriate their neighbors’ property. Thousands of Christians were executed, often using gruesome methods, while more than 100,000 flew from their homes into the Kurdish region.

Three years later, Iraqi and coalition forces have liberated much of the ISIS-occupied territory, including Mosul, which served as a second capital city for the so-called caliphate. Now Christians and other minorities find themselves caught in the crossfire between the Iraqi central government, autonomous Kurdish authorities, and the various sectarian militias that sprang up to fight ISIS. There are also more mundane problems, including housing and medical shortages, ruined infrastructure, and a lack of job and education opportunities that impels young Iraqi Christians, especially, to seek asylum in the West.

Still, the darkest night has passed. The biggest challenge facing Archbishop Warda and his colleagues now is ensuring that the rest of Iraqi society understands what transpired in 2014-17, so that it isn’t repeated. ISIS set out to systematically destroy Iraq’s minority communities–genocide, in a word.

Archbishop Warda was grateful to Tillerson for his willingness to use the “g”-word and to forcefully denounce ISIS crimes. In August, Tillerson told reporters that “ISIS is clearly responsible for genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” against Christians, Yazidis, and others. Tillerson’s predecessor, John Kerry, also used the term “genocide” in the twilight days of the Obama administration, but the 44th president’s anti-ISIS campaign remained feeble to the end. Tillerson’s State Department, moreover, has matched rhetoric to action, intervening repeatedly to ensure that Iraqi and Kurdish authorities didn’t trample on Christian rights. In one case, American diplomatic efforts prevented a Christian town, which had been rebuilt with Hungarian funds, from being targeted amid the recent Arab-Kurdish conflagration.

For the archbishop, Tillerson’s statement, and the Trump administration’s special concern for Christians and other minorities, were of more than symbolic value. Muslim Iraqis, he said, must confront the “loss” that comes with uprooting people who have been part of Iraq for centuries. U.S. use of the term genocide, he hoped, would be properly commemorated in Iraqi textbooks and not soon forgotten. Whatever the outcome of his tensions with the Trump White House, Rex Tillerson can look back on his work on behalf of Iraqi minorities with justified pride.