Canada, Virtuous, Self-Congratulatory 

Yazidis flee violence in the Iraqi region of Sinjar on Aug. 10, 2014. Displaced families from Iraq's minority Yazidi sect crossed the border into Syria. (Ari Jalal/Reuters)

The Government of Canada has a humanitarian tradition of providing assistance to those in need. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is committed to offering help to vulnerable Yazidi women and children and other survivors of Daesh and to taking the necessary time to do this right. Canada will welcome approximately 1200 vulnerable Yazidi women and children and other survivors of Daesh and their family members by the end of 2017.
Canada offers assistance based on vulnerability, not on the basis of religion or ethnicity alone. That is why Canada’s program will help vulnerable Yazidi women and children and other survivors of Daesh. Yazidis will feature prominently since they suffered a particularly high level of violence at the hands of Daesh.
These individuals have experienced severe trauma, thus coordination with the settlement community in Canada is underway to ensure that settlement services are available to meet the particularly acute needs of those we are welcoming.
We are working with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to identify vulnerable Yazidi women and children and other survivors of Daesh as well as their family members who are both inside and outside of Iraq.
Between October 25, 2016 and February 22, 2017, the target date set in a motion passed by the House of Commons, we expect nearly 400 survivors of Daesh to have arrived in Canada as government-assisted refugees.
The size of Canada’s initiative is comparable to that of the German operation, which brought just over 1000 vulnerable women and girls from Northern Iraq to Germany over the course of a year in light of the difficult operating environment and the need to have specialized supports in place prior to their arrival.
In addition to the 1200 government-assisted refugees Canada will welcome, we are also facilitating the private sponsorship of individuals who fall within this vulnerable group. More Yazidi and other survivors of Daesh will arrive in Canada as privately sponsored refugees.
Individuals outside Iraq, in Lebanon and Turkey, and registered with the UNHCR were referred to Canada. Most of these individuals will be in Canada by February 22, 2017.
Inside Iraq, UNHCR is identifying individuals with the support of local authorities and non-government organizations in the Middle East.
This part of the initiative focuses on the vulnerable Yazidi women and children and other survivors of Daesh and their family members, and will allow the resettlement of individuals who do not fit into the traditional category of “refugees” as they are internally displaced, i.e. still in their home country.
Canadian visa officers recently interviewed a small group of people, who will be the first group of internally displaced persons in Iraq considered for resettlement to Canada. Bringing a smaller number of individuals early on will help us determine whether the settlement services in place are adequate.
It is not Canada’s intention to resettle large numbers of the Yazidi people. The Yazidi are an integral part of Iraq’s society and it is important to recognize that many people wish to remain in their community which is why the program will focus on a small number of people for whom resettlement is the best option.
Iraqis inside Iraq receive assistance from their government along with support from non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Canada is offering resettlement as one solution, in the context of larger humanitarian efforts in the region. We recognize that people who have suffered greatly at the hands of Daesh may not be able to reintegrate into their communities or may need access to specialized services and care. For these individuals, resettlement to Canada may be the best option.
We have obtained the consent of the Government of Iraq to operate in the region. We have also been in touch with authorities from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, who are also supportive of our plan.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada

CBC News spoke to members of a family who came to Canada this past year as part of a federal program to resettle 1,200 Yazidis and other survivors of ISIS atrocities by the end of 2017. Left to right: Melkeya and her 3-year-old son Hawar; Shahrestan, 8, Haval, 10, and their mother Basema; and Basema's 13-year-old son Hazal. (Martin Trainor/CBC)

Canada saw fit to rescue 40,000 Syrian refugees, inviting and bringing over externally displaced Sunni Syrians whom the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad targeted as enemies of his sectarian Alawite regime because they protested their vulnerability in a government that short-changed its majority Sunni population and elevated the status of regime-supporting Shiites. Millions of Syrians were both internally and externally displaced, forming a huge mass movement of people desperate to escape their government's program of extermination of "terrorists".

Protesting Sunni Syrians were labelled terrorists by the Assad regime, not because they were in fact terrorists but because they assumed that status in confronting the regime with the conditions of their second-class status, entreating it to consider equal rights for them such as were enjoyed by the minority Syrian Shiite Alawite population. Syrians have comprised the bulk of people fleeing civil war, sectarian violence and poor economic prospects in hope for a future elsewhere. And Canada committed to absorbing a substantial number of them.

At the same time in the same venue of the Middle East, in Iraq and Syria, while the Syrian regime was destroying the future of Syrian Sunnis, the Islamist fundamentalist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was viciously preying on Shiites, Christians and Yazidis, an ancient people of the region who number in total less than a million souls. The ISIS assault on the Sinjar region of Northern Iraq represented a genocidal humanitarian crisis. The assault slaughtered Yazidi men and boys while taking Yazidi women and girls into custody of the terrorists as sex slaves.

These totally vulnerable women and girls were sold in slave markets for sex slaves, repeatedly raped, depersonalized, dehumanized and devalued in a deliberate use of human beings as stock animals to supply leisure pleasure to ISIL fighters terrorizing the people of Iraq and Syria and inspiring to jihad through violent terror Muslims living in Europe and North America to join them abroad or wreak terrorist havoc right where they were. On the issue of rescuing those most in need of a new start in life, having suffered incalculable physical and psychological trauma, the plight of the Yazidi people received universal short shrift.

Yazidi women mark the anniversary of what a UN-appointed commission of independent war crimes investigators calls an ISIS-led genocide against the Yazidi population. (Sertac Kayar/Reuters)

It became a popular humanitarian/political motif for intake nations of the world to trumpet their rescue of Syrian refugees and then the flood of haven seekers and economic migrants from North Africa and the Middle East erupted with mostly young, unaccompanied men declaring themselves refugees in need of haven. Yazidi women and girls who had undergone agonizing dehumanizing atrocities as sex slaves, considered worthless chattel by ISIL terrorists, failed to capture the attention of the world. Canada declared it would respond to their need by absorbing a paltry 650, then upped their goal to accepting a total of 1,200.

But Canada, in its much-touted, self-congratulatory generosity has also, despite attestation that adequate security measures were taken in assessing the backgrounds of those accepted, appears to have taken in former members of ISIL as well as legitimate refugees. Yazidi women who had suffered agonizingly degrading misery at their hands and hoping to find healing in their search for a future for themselves and their children cannot be assured they won't come across someone who had formerly tortured and raped them, as happened to one woman now living in Hamilton.

This Yazidi woman arrived at the refugee centre there to inform them of the man she saw, his correct name along with his ISIL name. The disinterested official informed her she could not possibly be certain she was identifying a man who had tormented and raped her for months on end, and advised her "don't tell anyone".  His identity is now known, provided by the woman who had undergone unspeakable pain and torment at his hands, but he remains free to roam about the streets of the city she now lives in.