Ottawa commits to rescuing hundreds of Yazidis facing IS terror

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This article was published 23/10/2016 (2741 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Hundreds of Yazidi refugees at risk of being executed or captured as sex slaves by Islamic State terrorists should be headed to Canada within four months, as the federal government moves to make resettling them a priority.

Immigration Minister John McCallum told the House of Commons Monday the Liberals would be supporting a Conservative motion to declare the attacks committed against the Yazidis in Iraq as a genocide and provide asylum within 120 days particularly to Yazidi women and girls who are being treated as sex slaves by IS.

“We have just come back from a mission in the region to determine how many and from where and over what time period we will be welcoming more Yazidis to Canada,” McCallum said. “We have committed to do this and it will be done.”

McCallum’s pledge left Winnipegger Michel Azizi almost speechless.

“Are you serious?” he asked, when told of McCallum’s statement. “Oh my gosh. This is what we were hoping for for months.”

Azizi is the chair of Operation Ezra, an initiative started by Winnipeg Friends of Israel that has expanded into a multifaith organization trying to resettle as many Yazidi families as it can. Two families already arrived in Winnipeg and five more are awaiting approval, but Azizi said Operation Ezra cannot help all the Yazidis who need help.

Azizi said he gets calls for help constantly from thousands of Yazidis in refugee camps, where they are segregated from others for their own safety.

The Yazidis are a religious minority group of about 700,000 people that mostly lived in northern Iraq near the Syrian border. In 2014, IS launched a campaign launched against Yazidis in the Sinjar district; men and boys are executed if they refuse to convert to Islam and women and girls are captured as sex slaves. At least 5,000 have been killed and somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 women and girls enslaved.

About 100,000 Yazidis are now in refugee camps in Turkey and Syria. Their homeland in Iraq has been destroyed.

There are about 400 Yazidis living in Canada, about half in Winnipeg and the other half in London, Ont.

In June the Liberals voted down a Conservative motion calling on the House of Commons to declare as genocide IS crimes against several religious minorities, including Christians, Shiite Muslims and Yazidis. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at the time he did not want to play partisan politics and that Canada would support the United Nations Security Council if it declared a genocide.

Days later a UN report did just that and asked the rest of the world to step in to help.

Last week, Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel introduced a revised motion specific to the Yazidis calling for Canada to acknowledge the genocide and the plight of Yazidi women and girls, heed the UN recommendations to help and commit to providing asylum for women and girls within 120 days.

Although McCallum told the Commons the government was working on something, it wasn’t clear if the Liberals would support the motion, so an intense lobbying effort took place over the last three days that included some people within the Liberal party itself, as well as Operation Ezra and Yazidis already in Canada.

Then, on Monday, McCallum made his pledge to support the motion in response to a planted question from a Liberal backbencher.

Rempel was still pushing to have McCallum commit to a specific number of Yazidis, saying last year the government stuck hard to its pledge to bring in 25,000 Syrians in less than two months. She said however she was “really happy” the Liberals are finally moving on it at all.

“I’m having one of those moments where sometimes you feel like you can make a difference,” she said.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca