Mirza Ismail Chairman, Yezidi Human Rights Organization International
Distinguished gentlemen, honourable Chair Borys, committee members, and honoured guests. I am honoured to be here. Thank you for this opportunity to speak at the CIMM meeting on the situation of the Yazidi refugees in Turkey, Syria, and Greece and of the IDP in northern Iraq.
I also would like to thank our Canadian government for recognizing and actually declaring last June that ISIS committed genocide after the UN declared it so. I would like to thank our government for declaring that.
Yazidis are indeed the victims of genocide. The Yazidi are an ancient and proud people from the heart of Mesopotamia, the base place of civilization and the base place of many of the world’s religions. We believe in a supreme God and in God’s seven archangels. Yazidi is a religion, a culture, and a language.
Yazidis are desperately in need of your immediate help and support. During our 6,000 years of history, the Yazidi have faced 74 genocides in the Middle East, including the ongoing genocide. Why? It is simply because we are non-Muslims. Yes, some of you may say, there are many, even Shia Muslims, facing this. This conflict has been between Shia and Sunni for centuries, but when they commit genocide against us, they do it because we are non-Muslims, because we are Yazidi.
We are considered infidels in sharia law, or what they call “the people without book”, whether it is Yazidis, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, etc. They are encouraged to kill, rape, enslave, and convert us.
On June 23, 2016, in the Skaramagas refugee camp in Greece, the Arabs, Kurds, and Afghans called a jihad to kill the Yazidis in the camp. These Muslim jihadists attacked the Yazidi refugees with knives, metal bars, sticks, and stones. They injured 18 Yazidi men who tried to defend their families and their people. The 18 injured men were taken to the hospital for medical treatment. They also ravaged their tents and belongings. The attack started at 9:30 p.m. and ended at 3:00 a.m. on June 24. This is not the first attack against the Yazidi refugees in Greece. There have been attacks and violence against the Yazidi refugees in Greece, in Turkey, in Syria, and even in Germany, many times, by ISIS supporters or ISIS members in those countries.
There are about 750 Yazidi refugees in Skaramagas camp. In total there are about 3,363 Yazidi refugees in Greece. This is happening in Greece despite the fact that Greece is not a Muslim country. What about countries like Turkey or Syria? If that could happen in Greece, you can imagine what is happening. You can see on the screen pictures of the victims of the attack by ISIS members or supporters in Greece.
Most of the staff of the UNHCR in Turkey and Syria are Muslims and they violently discriminate against the Yazidi, who do not dare protest their ill treatment or demand their rights. They are given four to five years for a UN interview. I have evidence I am happy to show anyone who wants to see it.
There are thousands of Yazidi refugees currently languishing in Turkey, Syria, and Greece. At the top of the threatened and persecuted list are Yazidis, then come Chaldo-Assyrians and Mandaeans. More than 5,000 Yazidi were murdered by ISIS in August 2014, and more than 3,000 are still enslaved, mostly young women and children.
Humanitarian aid, while necessary, is not sufficient. Much of the humanitarian aid distributed by the Kurdish regional authority and the Iraqi government never gets into the hands of those who need it, those for whom it was intended, because of skimming, corruption, and politics.
If humanitarianism is the chief reason being cited in accepting the refugees, they should receive priority simply because they are the most vulnerable and persecuted in the Middle East, and they are the ones who have nowhere else to go.
There are thousands of young Yazidi women, girls, and children who as I speak have been enslaved and forced into sexual slavery. These girls are subjected to daily, multiple rapes by ISIS monsters. According to many escaped women and girls I met within northern Iraq, the abducted Yazidis, mostly young women and children, numbered more than 7,000 at the beginning. Some of those women and girls have had to watch seven-, eight-, and nine-year-old children bleed to death before their eyes after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day. I met mothers, whose children were torn from them by ISIS. These same mothers came to plead for the return of their children only to be informed that they, the mothers, had been fed with the flesh of their own children—children murdered, then fed to their own mothers.
ISIS militia have burned many Yazidi girls alive for refusing to convert and marry ISIS men. Young Yazidi boys are being trained to be jihadists and suicide bombers. The entire Yazidi population of Mount Sinjar was displaced in less than one day, on August 3, 2014.
On August 2, 2014, on the eve of the ISIS attack against the Yazidis in Sinjar region, more than 10,000 of the local authority’s forces were present, allegedly there to protect the Yazidis. The Yazidis tried desperately to flee for their lives to Mount Sinjar, but the KRG militias didn’t allow it. At about 10 p.m. they escaped back to the KRG region, and they refused to give any weapons to Yazidis to defend themselves against ISIS.
They trapped the children and women. For them it became a waiting room for death and carnage at the hands of ISIS. The Yazidis who begged and pleaded for weapons to save themselves and their people were killed like dogs by peshmergas. Thousands of men were killed on the spot, including hundreds who were beheaded. The UN estimates that 5,000 Yazidis were murdered and thousands of women and children taken hostage.
Today I am pleading with each and every one of you in the name of humanity to lend us your support at this crucial time to save the indigenous and peaceful peoples of the Middle East: the Yazidis, the Chaldo-Assyrians, and the Mandeans.
Our demand of the Canadian government is to bring as many Yazidi refugees from Turkey, Syria, and Greece as possible, because they are the most vulnerable group and their lives are in danger. If the Yazidis can be attacked in Greece, how about the Yazidi refugees in Turkey and Syria, which are Muslim countries?
We ask Canada to bring in the abducted Yazidis who were able to escape from ISIS. Canada can bring those escaped Yazidi girls from Iraq under section 25 of the immigration law. As my colleague said, Germany has accepted 1,000 who are underaged with their families, so why can Canada not do that?
We ask the Canadian government to be the leading hand in rescuing the more than 3,000 Yazidis who are still being held in captivity by ISIS in Iraq and Syria and in monitoring the ISIS borders so that ISIS doesn’t transport them to other countries. Humanitarian aid must be sent immediately and directly to those internally displaced Yazidis, and especially to the Yazidis in Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. The KRG has put food sanctions on the Yazidis there. There is an imminent threat of starvation, dehydration, and disease.
We ask our government to intervene with the Iraqi government and support the creation of an autonomous region for the Yazidi Chaldo-Assyrians in Sinjar and the Nineveh plain under the protection of international forces and directly tied to Baghdad’s central government. This right is guaranteed under the Iraqi constitution, article 125. It needs implementation. This is the only way we can survive in our homeland in the Middle East.
Thank you so much for listening and for your careful consideration going forward. We beseech you to act with the greatest urgency to help save the remnants of our Yezidi nation of the Chaldo-Assyrians and other minorities who face the same thing. Only with your help, after we have experienced so much death and suffering, is there a possibility of a peaceful life going forward for our people.
Thank you.
Page source:
https://openparliament.ca/committees/immigration/42-1/24/mirza-ismail-1/only/
