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.
 

Virtuously Despicable Canada

"We shared [Bob Rae's] report [assigned  as special envoy to Burma by the Trudeau government] with many people here [at the annual Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Dhaka, Bangladesh, May 5, 6], and we plan to translate it both into Bengali and Rohingya so that people in Bangladesh and the Rohingya can read it in their own languages."
"A number of [recommendations] we are already implementing, and my trip here ... is one example of acting on Bob's recommendation that Canada should be taking a leadership role."
"The most valuable part of this trip is being able to talk to people who are being persecuted who are at the heart of this crisis."
Chrystia Freeland, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Canada

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland meets with Médecins Sans Frontières volunteers at a Rohingya refugee camp at Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh on May 4, 2018. (Chrystia Freeland/Twitter)

The foreign ministers of 57 Muslim majority countries met for their annual conference taking place this year in Dakha, Bangladesh, primarily to discuss the plight of the Rohingya Muslims who in their tens of thousands were violently persecuted in Buddhist-majority Burma, the Burmese military and citizens alike threatening, killing, raping, burning their villages, causing them to flee the carnage and make the dangerous river crossing from Burma (Myanmar) into Bangladesh. Three-quarters of a million Rohingya now live in refugee camps, crowded and miserable.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has a distinct purpose; to come to the aid of persecuted Muslims globally. This is their sole interest and mandate. Among the OIC countries there are those represented in the possession of immense wealth at their disposal. Indonesia and Malaysia, two large Muslim-majority southeast Asian countries could absorb Rohingya refugees; the Gulf States have sufficient riches to fund the transfer, rescue and support required to absorb the Rohingya in Muslim countries.

Yet Canada, out of the goodness of its non-Muslim soul, has intervened, its Minister of Foreign Affairs a special guest at the conference, to address those gathered, for the purpose of affirming Canada's dedication to human rights and to aid in the rescue of these miserable cast-outs whose condition is truly pathetic. Canada's portrayal as a champion of human rights and specifically of the Rohingya is a wretched sham; yet another instance of Justin Trudeau extending Canada's resources in a virtuous bid to demonstrate how selfless Canada is prepared to sacrifice on behalf of the downtrodden.

But the Rohingya have many champions, they were all present at the conference, expressing their anger at the Buddhist Myanmar enemies of Islam. How many among them stood to affirm their nation's intention to come to the rescue of the Rohingya in their time of need? Canada alone? If Canada's Liberal government was sincerely given to aiding those in need, they had ample opportunity to recognize the friendless Yazidis, an ancient ethnic Middle East group with an exotic religion scorned by Islam, their people a target for mass murder and enslavement of women and children.

Many of the Yazidi children suffer from malnutrition and diseases. They live in hovels built from stones and rubble. Photo: Christian Werner

The Yazidis have few champions other than the Kurds to whom they are distantly related ethnically and perhaps culturally. Their plight is truly desperate. Yet it has been ignored. They are persecuted by Islam and were very much so by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant which still holds many women and girls captive, and still remain a threat to the Yazidis who they have driven from their ancestral homes. The Canadian Liberal government's virtue-signalling on behalf of Muslims is a capricious and truly stellar hypocrisy.

To champion the Yazidis and come to their rescue requires a resolve and dedication to a kind of altruistic move that will bear no advantage to the Liberals; Muslims in Canada represent a huge voting bloc; the Muslim community represented by the OIC in the United Nations are another choice voting bloc bringing the non-aligned nations with them to lift Canada into its coveted United Nations Security Council seat.

The sanctimony of Justin Trudeau's Liberal government is infuriatingly unrepresentative of decency and honesty. And certainly unreflective of most Canadians' values and wishes.

Some Yazidis have managed to reach the province of Dahuk in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region

Freed, Liberated, Catatonic

Souhayla, a 16-year-old girl who escaped the Islamic State after three years of captivity, at her uncle’s home in Shariya Camp, Iraq. Credit Alex Potter for The New York Times

"Very tired", "unconscious", "in severe shock and psychological upset" represented some of the terminology used by a Yazidi gynecologist in diagnosing the behaviour and reaction of Yazidi women in his care who were rescued from captivity by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist fighters. The women and girls had been abducted and were abused in a never-ending cycle of violence perpetrated against them as sex slaves.

"We thought the first cases were difficult. But those after the liberation of Mosul, they are very difficult."
Dr. Nagham Nawzat Hasan

Dr Hasan has treated over a thousand rescued Yazidi women and girls, who are in a state of traumatic shock. They sleep for days on end, according to Hussein Qaidi, director of the abductee rescue bureau in Shariya Camp, Iraq. "Ninety percent of the women coming out [of captivity] are like this", explained Mr. Qaidi; 'this' being a state of suspended animation as though suppressing their emotions has deadened them, at least temporarily, to life.

Commonly found in the Sinjar mountains, the Yazidi account for less than two percent of Iraq's population of 38 million Getty

Souhayla is 16 years old. She was 13 when she was abducted, since then she was sold nine times and repeatedly raped by seven different men. Unable to muster the physical resources required to even hold her head upright at her liberation. She needs help to even drink water. Even so it is difficult for her to swallow. She speaks in a voice so faint it is difficult to interpret what she says without placing an ear close to her mouth. Her family has no wish to withhold her identity. Making her name public, they feel will enable people to fully understand the agonizing torture she was forced to endure.

"This is what they (ISIS) have done to our people", her uncle says. Last year the operation to retake Mosul from Islamic State yielded about 180 women, girls and children of the minority Yazidis, captured by the terrorists in 2014. Iraq's Bureau for the Rescue of Abductees verifies the numbers. Those who saw rescue within the first two years of their sex slavery returned home to their ancestral homeland with suicidal thoughts, infections and broken limbs. All of which it is hoped, will heal.

The women who sustained three years of captivity, like Souhayla are seen to be more psychically and physically damaged. They suffer an extraordinary amount of psychological pain and injury. Souhayla's image was posted on Facebook by her uncle, Khalid Taalo, who is attempting to nurse his niece back to some semblance of health. With her image went a description of her dreadful ordeal. Souhayla managed to escape her captor on July 9, two days following an airstrike.

The building where she was kept along with another Yazidi girl saw a wall collapse. While Souhayla survived, the other girl was buried and killed in the rubble. But then so was their captor. Eventually Souhayla was able to make her way through the rubble, and eventually found herself at an Iraqi checkpoint. "I ran to her and she ran to me and we started crying and then we started laughing as well", Mr. Raalo said. "We stayed like that holding each other, and we kept crying and laughing until we fell to the ground."

And then, nothing. She would no longer speak. Reunited with her mother and the rest of her family Souhayla's consciousness evaporated. Antibiotics for a urinary tract infection was prescribed by examining doctors. She was also diagnosed in a state of malnutrition. Two weeks after her return to her family she was finally able to stand for a few minutes, her legs still unsteady.

As for other returnees, some go to extraordinary lengths to try to retain some semblance of human dignity, to defend themselves from their own perceptions of self as irredeemably 'spoiled'; repeatedly raped, their humanity soiled. Yazidi sisters, 20 and 26 drew the attention of camp officials at the Hamam Ali 1 refugee camp, wearing niqabs they refused to go without, as though to hide behind the anonymity of facelessness. Yazidi women never cover their faces ordinarily.

They spoke of their Islamic State rapists as their "husbands", as "martyrs", according to camp official Muntajab Ibraheem, director of the Iraqi Salvation Humanitarian Organization. Holding three toddlers their captivity and constant rapes had produced, they shunned nursing the babies. Camp officials saw no solution other than to complete paperwork to enable the children to become wards of the state.

The liberated women were unable to stand, lying on mattresses inside the plastic walls of the tent in the camp. Those women who attempted desperately to shield themselves from recognition, and who shunned their babies fell into a deep coma-like state from which they occasionally awoke momentarily before falling back to sleep, a sleep that seemed would never conclude. As though they were intent on shielding themselves from reality.

This image taken in August 2014 shows Yazidi people fleeing their homeland in Northern Iraq after the arrival of Islamic State. Thousands of women and girls were captured at the time and used as sex slaves for ISIS soldiers.  AP

Islamic State Terrorists on Trial, Nineveh Court

"I kept the four girls in an abandoned house. Each night I would have sex with a different one. Sometimes they seemed scared, but they never said no. They were all virgins when I got them and more beautiful than you can imagine."
"I shot them [Yazidi men and boys in a Sinjar primary school] there in the school hall. I think I killed ten or twelve of them, including some children."
"They [the four Yazidi women] were part of my salary, I received 60,000 [$64] dinars a month and the women as a bonus. I gave them [when he was finished with the women] to another fighter in return for $200 each."
"I was brainwashed. I thought the Yazidis were infidels, like Jews. That they were lower than Muslims and that what we were doing to them was OK. The leaders injected me with drugs, which made me act that way. I'm as sorry as there are numbers of hairs on my head."
Mohammed Ahmed, 40, Islamic State fighter

Iraqi Christian militia fighters drive a pickup truck in Qaraqosh (also known as Hamdaniya), transporting four prisoners, allegedly members of the Islamic State group.JM Lopez/AFP/Getty Images/Files

This poor man who was unable to muster free agency of his own because he was forced to become drug-dependent to enable him to carry out his duties to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, has told his sad and sordid tale to Judge Arif, holding court, interviewing captured ISIL terrorists, in Qaraqosh, a small Christian town outside Mosul, to which, since its liberation from ISIL, Christians have been returning to their traditional home after fleeing for their lives with the entry of Islamic State.

It is more than abundantly clear why the man on trial claiming to regret what he had done, does so. It was fine while Islamic State held the initiative and he followed instructions leading to the slaughter of Yazidi men and boys, retaining women and girls as sex slaves, to be raped, bartered, and sold into slavery. The run of violent conquest enjoyed by Islamic State and its 'fighters' must have been intoxicating to men of this ilk; little wonder he now has regrets, that he has been taken prisoner and that he will be held as guilty, his confession signing his penalty.

Isis fighters were carrying out a pre-planned mass abduction for the purpose of institutionalised rape. Initially they were looking for unmarried women and girls over eight. Reuters

He is obviously among the fortunate ones whose capture did not mean immediate death, or death following exquisite torture when former victims found their opportunity for vengeance. Death, destruction, hatred and revenge, based on virulent tribal and clan animosities inherited from generation to generation, augmented by the certainty that those practising a variation of the religion that fanatics believe theirs only has currency, is a hallmark of Islam and the Middle East in particular, though South Asia and North Africa run close behind.

"Many of us have shot them on sight. We see Daesh fighters going free after we hand them over to Intelligence and there is no justice in the courts. Sometimes  you have to take the law into  your own hands", offered a soldier with the Iraqi military's US-trained 16th Division. Another of the presiding judges among the dozen sitting in Nineveh court, where among the dozen 40 to 50 cases similar to that of Mohammed Ahmed are heard daily, said that some of those being held as ISIL  suspects reflect mistaken identities, while others yet are accused falsely by neighbours and those holding grudges.

In all, said Judge Hashim, five thousand people held to be ISIL fighters were held in prisons transformed out of empty houses in and around Mosul. He had personally signed arrest warrants the week before for an additional 6,500 suspected ISIL members. The fortunate ones make it into the court which happens to be the sole such facility in northern Iraq equipped to try such cases. Two to three detainees die daily resulting from poor prison conditions. Reports abound of soldiers executing prisoners to dump their corpses into the Tigris river.

The proof is there in abundance, with bodies washing up regularly along the banks of the Biblical-era Tigris. When Judge Arif finishes hearing Ahmed's case, he will pass it along to an adjacent court to the attention of a more senior judge who will commit to sentencing the man. His prospects are life in prison; alternatively, beheading. The barbarism on display in Islamic State sleek public relations videos of beheadings, crucifixions, garroting, immolation, victims drowning in cages, blown up with explosives strapped to their bodies, has its counterpart in Iraqi justice.

"He says he's sorry and regrets what he did, but apparently not enough to hand himself in. We had to find and arrest him. We have a lot of evidence against him and several witnesses; it won't be hard to convict."
"We found a lot of ISIL paperwork in Mosul, which makes our job a lot easier. They weren't a ragtag militia, they were incredibly organized, like an army, and documented everything."
Judge Arif, Nineveh court, Qaraqosh, Iraq

Displaced Yazidis from Sinjar fleeing Isis walk towards the Syrian border, August 2014. Photograph: Rodi Said/Reuters

Mohammed Ahmed spoke volumes of the activities of his Uthman Brigade. Describing how he and others rounded up Yazidi men and boys in a Sinjar region primary school in 2014, to kill them. The girls and women, though, were  useful as sex slaves and his commander, an ISIL emir, ordered Ahmed to select from among the women and girls those he found prettiest to be taken back to Mosul to be sold into slavery and to be used by senior members to be raped. He was himself given four from age 22 to 30 for his personal disposal.

The ISIL suspects taken into custody to stand trial by the thousands were kept blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, and kneeling on the floor, facing the wall. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Like the ordeal that the British envoy Terry Waite -- commissioned on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury to try to mediate between Hezbollah and the Western captives taken by that Lebanese Shiite terrorist group -- suffered when he was himself taken captive. Inhumane treatment is a specialty of Arab Muslims.

As for the judicial proceedings taking place in Qaraqosh, it is not the government that is determined to bring ISIL terrorists to justice by funding the proceedings to enable them to proceed. "Everything in this courtroom I bought myself with my own money, this desk, this fridge, the air conditioning, nothing comes from Baghdad. If we don't pay for it, no one else will", acknowledged Judge Hashim.

An altar of a damaged church in Qaragosh, Iraq where the numbers of Christians in Iraq have fallen from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand since 2003

Alone, Abandoned, Enslaved and Degraded : Where is the Conscience of the World?

"We are grateful and honoured to receive the Sakharov Prize, but the EU can and must do more. The European Union must call this what it is: a genocide of our people."
"The EU must call for its prosecution and international accountability for ISIS, for example before the International Criminal Court, Tribunal, or a special court."
"We ask that the EU and all those concerned with the fate of Syria and Iraq establish a safe zone to protect the Yazidis, Christians and other vulnerable minorities in Sinjar and the Nineveh Plain."
"If the world can’t protect the Yazidis in our homeland, we ask Europe to give us a safe new home."
Yazidi women, Nadia Murad and Lamiya Ali Bashar

Nadia Murad (left) and Lamiya Aji Bashar were awarded the EU's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought

These are two Yazidi women who managed to escape their captors, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists who had taken them as slaves, subjected them to constant rape, and whom the two women had witnessed enacting atrocities against their people, their family members, themselves. They had endured captivity, slavery, punishment, violations of their humanity. And having managing to escape, live with the inexhaustible trauma of their suffering. Yet determined to speak as witness to horror, to alert the world community and to demand a response, to launch rescues for the thousands still held as captive slaves and to bring their tormentors to justice.

It has been years since the world was alerted that the Salafist Islamist terrorist group was targeting in particular the Yazidi population of northern Iraq when the town of Sinjar and villages and towns around it were attacked, sacked, thousands of Yazidi men and boys slaughtered while women and girls were taken captive to be sold at slave markets. Those who could, managed to escape and made their way up nearby Mount Sinjar where the West averted its eyes and the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds launched a rescue, leading many of the Yazidis to safety.

But many more Yazidis were left to languish on the mountain, families attempting to sustain themselves and to remain out of the clutches of ISIL. They remain there yet. Islamic State took pride in its slavery of an estimated seven thousand Yazidi women, to be apportioned among its fighters and sold on the slave market to raise funds for their exploits and purchase of guns, bombs and drones. The Islamic State has a Department of War Spoils, where it takes authority from the Koran and contracts are notarized by Islamic courts.

The Yazidis are distant relatives of the far more numerous Kurds, who have been offering them haven. They speak a version of the same language. It is their religion that earns them the contempt of ISIL, a combination of early Christianity, Islam and Judaism, worshipping a Peacock Angel and considered to be pagan. They harm no one. They take pride in their heritage and traditions. Theirs is not a proselytizing religion, nor do they intermarry outside the Yazidi tribe.

They campaign now in the free world for justice and relief. Hoping to move the consciences of those they believe can help them rescue their enslaved and tormented people, to release their homeland from the clutches of the Islamist jihadis, and to bring to justice those who have decreed they must be killed as  heretics, or as the Islamic State has it, their continued existence "is a matter that Muslims should question as they will be asked about it on Judgement Day".

Nadia Murad, born in a village in Iraq, was captured at age 21, enslaved and continually raped. She had been witness to six of her brothers and stepbrothers being murdered, along with her mother. Lamiya Ali Bashar, 18, was abducted by ISIL and passed from one to another once her village was captured in 2014. When she managed her escape with a handful of other young women in 2016, a landmine exploded where two of the girls died and her face was scarred and she was left blind in one eye.

When Boko Haram abducted hundreds of girls from their school in Nigeria in Chibok, the world was horrified and outrage was expressed everywhere. The First Lady of the United States declared herself one with the Chibok girls, demanding they be released, placing pressure on the government of Nigeria to launch a rescue. No similar rise of righteous indignation emanated from Michelle Obama at the fate of the Yazidi girls and women, nor have groups who agitate for women's rights taken up the plight of the Yazidi women.

In Response to a Desperate Need, Yazidis to Find Refuge in Canada

"The reality is that if the international community doesn't wake up to the plight of these people, they will be wiped off the face of the Earth."
"And that's why it's so important to look at resettlement of these people as only one very small piece of the broader puzzle."
Michelle Rempel, Conservative Member of Parliament, Ottawa

Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect walk toward the Syrian border on Aug. 11, 2014.
(STRINGER/IRAQ/REUTERS)

"[Canada has long given haven to refugees noting their "vulnerability, not religion or ethnicity [and turns its focus on] highly vulnerable [survivors of Islamic State predations. A] significant majority [of the 1,200 slated to be brought to Canada will be Yazidi resulting from the] high level of violence [they have suffered. The Yazidi people represent] an integral part [of Iraq's society that should be preserved which explains why the Government of Canada focuses on] a small number of people for whom resettlement is the best option."
"As many have experienced unimaginable trauma, both physical and emotional, many will have unique psychological and social needs such as trauma counselling,"
Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, Government of Canada

"Some of these women haven't even told their own families about what they experienced [as victims of Islamic State violent atrocities]."
Dawn Edlund, associate deputy immigration minister

The Government of Canada lauds itself for ensuring that 40,000 Syrian refugee families fleeing conflict in their own country were expedited entry into Canada to begin a new life, with assistance in housing, settling in, and financial aid through government tax-funded coffers. Canadians felt, by and large, fairly satisfied with the effort, though some might have felt it would have been useful to focus on the plight of women and children, with a special emphasis to begin with, on Christian Syrians and Yazidis, both of whom as minorities, were singled out for violent predation.

Yazidi women and children in particular have faced the horrific reality that the maltreatment they were singled out for destroyed families when Islamic State targeted Yazidi men for annihilation, piling them into mass graves, and taking the women and children into perpetual bondage status, as slaves to be bartered for, maltreated and violated. The 40,000 Syrians absorbed into Canada were victims of their own government, when the Shiite Alawite President of Syria took vicious exception to his Sunni Syrian population protesting their inferior place in Syria.

Few championed the plight of the thousands of Yazidi women who were sold in the marketplace as sex slaves. Those who were able to escape, were sheltered and protected by the Kurds, but the world at large seemed to take little notice of their misery and the plight they faced, destined to be slaughtered or their freedom taken from them, in an abysmal reality where they were considered less than human, and free for the taking. Michelle Rempel had a better understanding than most in government, having interviewed some Yazidi women.

That this current government has finally turned its attention to alleviating the plight of a relative handful of these vulnerable people is a welcome change. Erring on the side of caution reflecting their fears, the move to absorb 1,200 refugees comprised partially of entire families as well as individuals owes to the fact that many among them fear repercussions against other members of their families should much information be made available identifying them and their imminent move to Canada, and the government is respecting that cautionary need.

Immigration Minister Hussen spoke of close to 400 Yazidi refugees who have been accepted in the last four months, quietly and without fanfare, in contrast to the intense public exposure the intake of the Syrian refugees had been given. And, it seems that the absorption of 1,200 Yazidi refugees through government initiative won't be the end of the effort. The government is prepared to become involved in authorizing private sponsorships of Yazidi refugees, where groups associated with churches, for example, pool resources to sponsor refugees.

Four months ago the House of Commons was unanimous in its support of a motion brought by Conservative Members of Parliament, calling on the government to provide asylum opportunities to Yazidi women and girls, in recognition of their conditions of fraught existence in a geography where a ferociously inhumane Islamist jihadi group threatens their very survival to the point where the atrocities conducted upon the Yazidis have been named as genocidal in intention.

"Helping to resettle all child survivors is vital to this work", stated Immigration Minister Hussen, in acknowledgement of Islamic State's focus on targeting young boys as well as girls and women. The hope is that this government will continue to focus on the rescue of Yazidis, well deserving of Canadian efforts to offer them another opportunity to live life to its fullest potential, distanced from the horrors of their homeland where a Medieval fascism attempted to deprive them of their very existence.

Yazidis refugees carry their belongings on January 3 in Diyarbakir, southeastern Turkey as they change their refugee camp and move to Midyat, further south. The Trudeau government is poised to announce today that Canada will give asylum to 1,200 primarily Yazidi refugees by year end. While the majority of the refugees will come from Iraq, the government says some will also be accepted from Lebanon and Turkey.   (ILYAS AKENGIN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

No Nobler Cause to Commit to: Rescue of Yazidi Women and Girls: Immigration to Canada

That the House
(a) recognize that ISIS is committing genocide against the Yazidi people;
(b) acknowledge that many Yazidi women and girls are still being held captive by ISIS as sexual slaves;
(c) recognize that the government has neglected to provide this House with an appropriate plan and the corresponding action required to respond to this humanitarian crisis;
(d) support recommendations found in the June 15, 2016, report issued by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria entitled, “They came to destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis”; and
(e) call on the government to (i) take immediate action upon all the recommendations found in sections 210, 212, and 213 of the said report, (ii) use its full authority to provide asylum to Yazidi women and girls within 30 days.
Conservative Member of Parliament, Michelle Rempel, Official Opposition Immigration critic

Confoundingly, the Canadian left believes that the current Liberal-led government of sunny-face, selfie-addicted Justin Trudeau is a humanitarian camp devoted to extending themselves to better the lives of the unfortunate. What group of people at the present time could be deemed more unfortunate than the Iraqi Yazidis whom Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have targeted for extinction on the basis that Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his jihadi temporal agents of the divine have identified as apostates, deserving of death.

A migrant child stands next to a placard reading 'Please save the Yazidi people from genocide' at the Moria detention center during a visit of Pope Francis in Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos, on April 16. A religious freedoms group wants the Canadian government to take action and rescue at 400 Yazidi women, who have been raped and tortured.  (ARIS MESSINIS / AFP/Getty Images)

To be clear, death for Yazidi men and boys above a certain age, but for girls and women another fate awaits; a life of being held in contempt and constant rape and sexual slavery. So while tens of thousands of Yazidi men were slaughtered their wives and daughters were taken into slavery, as permitted by certain passages of the Koran, the Hadiths and other sacred writings of Islam promoting sexual license for the Islamist victors of conflict as a symbol of virtue in claiming bounties.

The previous Conservative-led government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which had committed itself on behalf of Canada, to rescuing refugees of violence perpetrated upon Sunni Syrians by their own Shiite-led government wanted to focus on refugees from all the territories administered by ISIL in Syria and Iraq. But refugees had to be selected from among those whom the United Nations deemed to be refugees and of whom background checks had been done by the United Nations.

The Harper government had a wish to focus primarily on rescuing the most vulnerable among those whom Islamic State threatened. Their focus narrowed to the rescue of Christians and of Yazidis of whom some 700,000 lived mostly in northern Iraq. The Yazidis who survive Islamic State predations have found haven with the Kurds, the most formidable foes of ISIL. Minority groups such as Christians and Kurds are protected by the Kurds who accept them as equals.

But because they have found haven in the Kurdish parts of Iraq the United Nations does not deem them to be refugees but rather internally displaced persons. They are not designated as refugees and have no formal papers provided to them by the UN, making them inadmissible for refugee status in countries like Canada, and it is this situation that the Harper government pointed out to be a hindrance to rescuing them under the UN refugee selection process.

The Trudeau government, on the other hand, refused to give priority to Christian and other non-Muslim minorities; their stance was that they were prepared to give all refugees equal status, even though under the circumstances Yazidis were not considered to be refugees. They were, however, oppressed, persecuted, faced slavery, mass rape and mass murder. It was not until a Conservative Member of Parliament took up their plight to canvass Members of Parliament representing all political parties that the tide was turned.

Even when the United Nations finally declared through the release of a UN-sponsored report, They came to destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis, that Islamic State was committing genocide, Canada's Foreign Minister was reluctant to echo that declaration, which would have meant committing to focusing on the rescue and immigration acceptance as refugees of the Yazidis desperate to find a place of haven and a future for themselves and their children.

Finally, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was shamed into acquiescing, admitting that a war crime of genocide was being committed against the Yazidis. And Canada committed to bringing in Yazidi women and children and Yazidi families to give them the opportunity of finding new lives in Canada. A unanimous Commons vote on October 25 committed to a rescue of Yazidi women and girls within 120 days of the vote.

Escaping Nightmares of ISIL Rape and Slavery

"They were laughing and said all of them have died. They showed me my three children. I was crying and kissing them and calling them [then the bodies were taken away]."
"They [jihadist ISIL] took the men in groups [in Sinjar, 2014]. They took them outside the village and killed them outside because we heard the shots."
"They took the old women also, after that, from us. They took them outside the building and we heard again the shooting. They were killed. We had 81 old women and they have this mass grave outside this building."
"The Daesh from Iraq, they sold us to the Daesh from Syria. They brought us to the border and exchanged us, put us in other cars and took money from the Syrian ISIL fighters."
"When we asked them about our destiny, what would happen to us, they said, 'We will sell you because you are our slaves. We will sell you to the other fighters'."
"My pregnancy was not a protection for me. Beside them raping me and treating me very bad, I was working in their office in this place where ISIL fighters, all of them, in the evening came. I was cleaning, working as a slave there."
"I tried to escape from this. I took my children and broke the door and escaped from the house but the area was completely strange ... We didn't know who was Daesh, who wasn't Daesh.
"My baby died in my hands. As he died, they took his body from me. I was crying but they beat me because I was crying. As I asked about my children they were laughing and said all of them have died."
"They took this picture and published it in their Facebook and social media, and said these are the bodies of infidels and this was punishment for trying to escape."
Marah, 28, from Khocho, Sinjar, rescued and in Kurdish Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq

Handout    Majed El Shafie, left, a Toronto-based lawyer trying to bring Yazdidi families who fled ISIL to Canada, meets with a former ISIL sex slave in Iraq. The woman asked her face and the face of her daughter not be shown.

"Iraq is based on tribes, based on regions and areas. Through the tribes you can make an exchange of materials that some of the bad guys need -- some of the forbidden fruit, as we call them."
"In Iraqi areas we were able to pinpoint four 'meat markets' -- sadly, that's what they're called. We were able to pinpoint four different markets, some of them in homes -- it's not like a supermarket, it's like in homes or whatever."
"And through the tribes' underground [networks], we were able to communicate with some of the people controlling these markets. We don't give money because that's the last thing you want to happen, but we give a material that they need in one way or another."
"Many of these guys, the tribes we are dealing with that join [ISIL] and so forth, they like their alcohol, they like their hashish, they like all of this, even though it is a forbidden fruit and because it is forbidden fruit it's very valuable in these areas."
"I have no regrets about it. I am saving these girls and I will continue to save these girls whatever the cost."
Majed El Shafie, Egyptian-Canadian, lawyer, founder One Free World International, Toronto

"We tried to run but when we were on the street we saw ISIL cars all around. [A Kurdish speaking Syrian ISIL fighter] told us, 'Until now I've saved 22 families and if I have an opportunity I will try to free you too."
"My only wish is to free the Yazidis women taken by [ISIL]. I can't live anymore in Iraq, I want someone to help me get out of this country."
Maha, Yazidi woman from Sinjar, now at Baharka camp for internally displaced people, Erbil, Iraq

Mr. El Shafie has conceived of a rescue agency which he operates out of Toronto. The goal of One Free World International is to rescue Yazidi women and girls from ISIL slavery and to bring them as refugees to Canada. In the process he has created a network of ties with local Kurdish tribes, he explains, claiming that they have connections with smugglers and traders. Through in an interview he said he could not elaborate on the details. Emissaries connected to his rescue group act as traders or smugglers with their insider information in attempts to make rescue deals for the enslaved Yazidi women and girls.

In testimony he gave before the Canadian House of Commons immigration committee in the summer, he was questioned about bribery, which he explained can be a necessary tool to enable his group to reach success in rescuing Yazidis held captive as slaves. He had been criticized about the methodology he used. He has himself committed to a number of expeditions to both Iraq and Syria in aid of facilitating Yazidi rescues from ISIL, of moving them to safe areas such as the United Nations refugee camps. His further goal is to move as many Yazidi families as possible to Canada.

So that when, last month the Canadian House of Commons voted unanimously to bring Yazidi refugees to Canada to help them start a new life without persecution and fear of violence in a country that would offer them haven and equality a bureaucratic obstacle was overcome, one that held that such Yazidi families did not qualify as refugees since they remained in their home country, despite their desperate and obvious plight.

John Moore/Getty Images   A former Yazidi resident walks through the rubble of his neighbourhood on Nov. 15, 2015 in Sinjar, Iraq. 

 

A horrendous plight more than obvious given the tearful and horrifying testimony of Yazidi women who have escaped, like Marah, a mother of five, and Maha, another young woman with multiple young children, both pregnant when caught by ISIL, and both repeatedly raped, abused, sold as sex slaves, and yet managing to escape the confines of their prisons, ending up as many such Yazidis do either slaughtered by Islamic State or captured as slaves, finally finding protection among the Kurds who accept them as relatives.

Marah's initial, unsuccessful escape was rewarded by Islamic State fighters who had imprisoned and abused her, by the poisoning of four of her children as due punishment and as an atrociously inhumane warning to other sex slaves not to attempt escape. Maha's good fortune led her to the attention of an ISIL fighter who obviously was anything but proud of his colleagues' penchant for rape and sexual slavery. What the two women and their remaining children hope desperately for is to find a way to escape the countries that have destroyed their homes, their families, their hopes.

"Abu Sa’id al-Khudri said: The Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) sent a military expedition to Awtas on the occasion of the battle of Hunain. They met their enemy and fought with them. They defeated them and took them captives. Some of the Companions of the Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) were reluctant to have intercourse with the female captives in the presence of their husbands who were unbelievers. So Allah, the Exalted, sent down the Qur’anic verse: “And all married women (are forbidden) unto you save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.” That is to say, they are lawful for them when they complete their waiting period."

Abu Dawud 2:2150

Institutional Incompetence

"I have never been more angry. I know that anger is a raw emotion and not necessarily the best thing to push public policy on. But I have never been more angry."
"Even now, after all this [ISIL butchery of Yazidi men, enslavement of thousands of Yazidi girls and women], they're still saying it's not easy to do. Of course it's not easy to do [rescue the Yazidis from their difficult-to-approach places of haven]. But it's the right thing to do."
"There is something fundamentally wrong, and pardon my crude colloquialism, but something o f--king wrong with the system if that's the talking point that goes out on this: ['It is not easy to bring the Yazidis here from the places where they are': Canada's Immigration Minister],"
"If we are actually saying that it's too hard for them to do this, then why do any of these people [lawmakers, public servants] have jobs. I just don't understand this. It's wrong."
Michelle Rempel, Conservative critic for immigration, refugees and citizenship, Canada

An ISIS fighter speaking before the start of a slave auction of Yazidi women and girls. (Sceenshot: YouTube)

It was this 36-year-old former cabinet minister in the previous Conservative-led government in Canada who worked to persuade Parliamentarians in the House of Commons to vote to declare the persecuted Yazidi minority in Iraq -- seeking haven in Kurdistan from the degradation imposed upon them by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant -- suffered from war crimes and genocide, and that Canada had an obligation to make a genuine effort to rescue as many of the Yazidi women as possible, as refugees.

The world first learned about the plight of the Yazidis when it was being reported in the media that thousands were stranded on Mount Sinjar where they escaped in desperation as Islamic State jihadis entered their traditional towns and villages below. The Islamic State jihadists declared the Yazidis -- an ancient ethnic group worshipping an ancient religion -- to be devil worshippers and deserving of death. Thousands of men and boys were slaughtered, the women and girls rounded up to become sex slaves.

A Yazidi girl who was raped and then

killed by ISIS fighters. (Screenshot.)

The tens of thousands of Yazidis who escaped immediate death and enslavement when their city of Sinjar was over-run by ISIL, were freezing on the mountain, faced with starvation and the lack of drinking water. Their plight was desperate. And it was Kurdish militias that opened a route to rescue them, leading them off the side of the mountain to a pass that took them across the border, from Iraq to Syria, and safety. The U.S. finally submitted to public pressure and began a brief bombing mission to cover their escape.

A Yazidi woman who eventually escaped from ISIS captivity.  (AP)

But those were the ones who escaped. The Yazidis represent a sizeable minority, They don't worship Islam, but rather an ancient amalgam of several religions pre-dating Islam. There is an estimated 700,000 of the ethnic group, considered distant cousins as it were, of the Kurds. Their home territory is in the Shingal Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. And their home territory has been horribly marred with the symptoms of what has befallen them through the ISIL incursion in fall 2014.

Mass graves of Yazidi men have been discovered. Thousands of Yazidi women and girls, enslaved, subjected to rape and torture, forced abortions and other  horrors, languish in the marketplace of slavery so celebrated by the ISIL caliphate, quoting from the Koran to lend dignity to their insufferable human rights violations marking them for the barbarians that they are, given to dreadful atrocities and regarding them as symbolic of their power and strength.

Most of the women who managed to escape the nightmare that the jihadists placed them in are in "internally displaced persons" camps in Iraq, where the United Nations refugee system doesn't reach. Germany has nonetheless exerted itself to succeed in absorbing over a thousand of the women as refugees. Aside from the Kurds, however, the Yazidis have few champions to speak on their behalf. So it really does behoove Canada to take a stand.

Puzzlingly, when the current Liberal-led government in Canada took great pleasure in portraying Canada as a saviour nation for taking in 30,000 Syrian refugees, they managed to overlook the plight of the Yazidis, far more desperate in many ways than the fate of many of the Syrians absorbed by Canada. The need for asylum to be given to Yazidi refugees is dire. Canadian immigration officials have been in Iraqi Kurdistan, ostensibly to get an idea of the situation, but they are moving in agonizingly slow motion.

On Tuesday in the Canadian House of Commons, the entire roster of Parliamentarians voted 313 to 0 to finally act with some speed to fulfill the humanitarian obligation to offer haven to Yazidis. The excuse was always given that it was too difficult to select Yazidis deserving of asylum because they had not first been scrutinized and given official status as refugees by the United Nations. It does the Trudeau government no credit that its Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion refused a motion the interim conservative leader of the Opposition brought before the House condemning the atrocities against Yazidis by ISIL, as genocide.

ISIS fighters in Iraq. (AP)

The excuse was that this was a responsibility of the United Nations. Following hard on their refusal to endorse the motion came the results of a UN investigation, with the High Commissioner for Human Rights confirming, based on that investigation, that the Yazidis were subjected to horrors easily surpassing the UN's 1948 genocide convention, designating the barbarities committed against them as genocide.

"Something changed in me. I was furious. When I heard our bureaucrats and the UN talk about why we couldn't be bringing these people to Canada, that was it. The thing that has angered me most is we have this absolutely ineffective inertia within our bureaucracy in Canada, and as well within the UN, in dealing with this. We have every tool at our disposal. The most frustrating thing for me over the past year and a half has been listening to all the reasons why we can't help, that it's too difficult."
"Well, I'm sorry."
Michelle Rempel, Official Opposition critic for immigration, refugees and citizenship

Responding to the Mass Islamist Psychosis

"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing."
"[ISIL] sought to erase the Yazidis through killings, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment."
"ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities."
"Girls as young as nine were raped, as were pregnant women. Most of those interviewed reported violent daily rapes by their fighter-owners."
Paulo Pinheiro, commission chairman, UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Geneva

Signatories to the Genocide Convention are obliged to "prevent and punish" perpetrators of the crime of genocide. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has launched what can only be considered a genocidal war against ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and Syria. Their particular focus on the Yazidis, an ethnic tribal group whose worship of an obscure religion with ancient roots and with some distant relationship to the far more numerous Kurds has led to mass murder, rape and enslavement.

Rodi Said / Reuters -- Displaced Yazidis walking from the plateau below Mount Sinjar to escape ISIL/2014

The plight of the Yazidis has been a wrenching exercise in helplessness. Women and children taken as slaves, sold and bartered, raped and tortured. Those men, youth and the elderly who were unable to escape the onslaught of the Islamic State when they first invaded Sinjar city and surrounding towns, saw those who could, escape up Mount Sinjar only to die from cold, exhaustion, lack of food and water and medical attention until they were finally rescued by Kurdish militias.

Mass graves containing the remains of Yazidis have been discovered, part of the evidence that has resulted in the United Nations declaring ISIL guilty of genocidal intention and succeeding to a barbaric degree in their intent to destroy an entire people. In 2014, Russia and China successfully blocked a UN Security Council resolution meant to enable referring ISIL's crimes to the International Criminal Court for prosecution.

The United Nations could theoretically invoke Chapter VII to embark on a mission where a UN-sanctioned coalition would invade Syria and/or Iraq to destroy ISIL, restoring security to the areas they considered their Islamist caliphate. They could try, but with the knowledge that both Russia and China would veto the initiative. The reason for their veto clear enough, since each of those countries visualize that enabling such a solution to challenge ISIL would create a precedent that neither are anxious to open future opportunities toward that might at some time target them.

Still, the reality is that, given to bloody butchery and wholesale atrocities, the more dreadful they are the more likely they are to be carried out by ISIL for shock value in attracting new recruits even while the rest of the world is shocked and traumatized by the inhumanity of methods desecrating the concept of the preciousness of human life. ISIL has proven that direct confrontation by a coalition prepared to commit to their destruction is the only course forward.

But then the matter of the wholesale dysfunction in Iraq and Syria is complicated by the sectarian hatreds unleashed by Syria's civil war and Iraq's sectarian inability to share governance with its major population sectors. And the obvious fact that the Syrian regime uses tactics and techniques just as dreadful and destructive of human rights as do the jihadists, yet the difference is seen as viewing ISIL as a terrorist group, while recognizing the Syria of Bashar al Assad as a legitimate government however deadly tyrannical.

But it is the tyranny of Assad that has driven the dislocation of half the population of Syria, sending millions beyond Syria's borders to become refugees living in squalid camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, hoping to some day return to Syria. Those no longer seeing hope for a return to a destroyed homeland have migrated dangerously with the aid of human smugglers into Europe to inundate the continent with Syrian refugees and opportunistic economic migrants from Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

By not making the effort to collectively take the initiative to put a halt to the bloody assaults killing perceived enemies in Iraq and Syria by Islamic State, the Syrian regime, al-Qaeda-linked Nusra and other jihadist groups, Europe is inviting by default more floods of refugees to inundate its shores and its resources. But then, there is that conundrum again, that a concerted effort by a collective of military groups like NATO will always come up against both UN vetoes (China and Russia) and physical opposition (Russia).

Moreover, the countries that have responded so magnanimously in embracing the presence of refugees and haven seekers, have failed to discriminate toward the types of refugees that are really in dire need of aid; Yazidis, fleeing Christians, Muslim gays, Sunni women and children. Instead, accepting the presence of young Muslim men prepared to bring with them customs and traditions inimical to those of the accepting countries. Infiltrated by the cunning casualness of ISIL fighters.

Tribal Sectarian Umbrage

"It doesn't matter whether they're Kurdish or Arab -- if they've burnt our homes and kidnapped our women we won't forgive them."
Sulaiman Omar, 37, Yazidi fighter

"How can we let Arabs back? We lived with them for hundreds of years and they stabbed us in the back."
"Arabs who lived here either [Sinjar, Iraq] helped ISIL militarily, financially or sympathized with them."
"We've not seen one example of an Arab helping a Yazidi."
Jadan Darush Jadan, Yazidi peshmerga colonel

"[Yazidis] believe all Muslims are ISIL."
"Zuher [his brother] was about 70 metres from the [Yazidi] ambush and he was the first to surrender. We heard the Yazidis yell, 'ISIL have killed many of us, we will kill you."
Sadiq Saleh, 41, Sunni Kurd, Qabusi, Iraq

Kurdish Peshmerga forces, police and local officials raise Iraqi and Kurdish flags in Sinjar after a Kurdish-led offensive backed by the U.S. recaptured the city from Islamic State on Nov. 13. Photo: Ben Kesling/The Wall Street Journal 

 

In the city of Sinjar located in Nineveh province, Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, Turkmens and Christians had traditionally lived together amicably as neighbours. Since the Islamic State jihadis flooded into Sinjar and targeted ethnic and religious minorities as they have done anywhere they have taken towns and cities in Syria and Iraq, the plight of the Yazidis in particular came to world attention. Yazidis practise a religion whose origins are not quite understood, but which Sunni Muslims regard as demonic.

In the onslaught of Sinjar thousands of Yazidis were slaughtered, women and children raped and taken as sex slaves. Yazidi families that survived fled in terror up Mount Sinjar to escape from ISIL terrorists and their homeless plight galvanized Syrian YPG Kurds to come to their rescue, while the Kurdish peshmerga of Iraq seemed incapable of mounting a rescue. Bad feelings between the two Kurdish militias has since emerged over their mutual blame, each wanting to be recognized as the supporters of the Sinjar Yazidis.

The Yazidis represent a minority tribal anomaly, distant relatives of the Kurds, practising their own customs and religious devotion. The Kurds, though not Arabs, are Muslims. And ethnic and sectarian groups that once lived together in peace find themselves newly aggrieved against one another since the arrival of Islamic State and the rise of sectarian hatreds, Sunni and Shiite Muslims contending each represents heretical worship.

With the help of U.S.-led airstrikes over Sinjar to dislodge Islamic State, the Iraqi peshmerga forces, the Syrian YPG Kurds and the Turkish PKK Kurds were enabled to free the city of its occupiers. Sinjar is a city in ruins. With its liberation from Islamic State and the entry of peshmerga fighters, both Kurds and Yazidis, looting of Sunni-owned homes and shops took place. The claims being that the Sunnis betrayed the Yazidis whom they lived among.

Sinjar had a majority-Yazidi population, the largest in the world. The fate of over a thousand Yazidi women remains unknown, sold into bondage for the most part. Sulaiman Omar had six brothers and among them many daughters. Long after the ISIL invasion, he has no idea whether any of his brothers are still alive, and the presence of their daughters is completely unknown; he partially blames his former neighbours.

The city is not yet re-occupied by its former residents; the city is a devastated ruin, and must be rebuilt. Hostility by the Yazidis has been extended as well to their former Kurdish neighbours, since they too are Muslim Sunnis. Sadiq Saleh, a shepherd who decided to remain in his hometown of Qabusi south of Sinjar when everyone else fled, to take care of his 200 sheep, was finally able to escape ISIL with the help of the peshmerga.

On arrival in Sinjar a group of Yazidi peshmerga accused him of stealing the sheep. Peshmerga Lt.Khero Khider witnessed events that led to the death of three Yazidi peshmerga and three Kurds. Zuher Hamza Abdullah, 21, younger brother of Sadiq, was shot seven times and bled o death. Two other Kurds were also killed. Another Kurdish man who had been freed from Qabusi described being kicked and close to killed by Yazidis.

"A group of women shielded me and they stopped", Abu Qasem, 63, explained. "Half of my family is under ISIL. We can't stop ourselves from wanting to stop the peshmerga from letting them [Kurds] through", said a young Yazidi peshmerga fighter who said that he would not have allowed Kurds to leave Qabusi. Yellow flags of the KDP, Iraqi Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, hang from lampposts.

"The blood of the peshmerga" had freed Sinjar, he said, to "become part of Kurdistan".

"The Yazidis don't trust the peshmerga and the peshmerga don't trust the Yazidis. Sinjar cannot be a place of coexistence again", stated a Yazidi tribal leader. As far as the PKK and its Syrian offshoot the YPG is concerned, there is little agreement with President Barzani's stance; they feel that Sinjar should be left to the Yazidis, their traditional home.

It is confounding that at a time in their history when Kurds should be cooperating and standing with one another to achieve their long-dreamed-of Kurdish state they should be reduced to arguing among one another over primacy. But they live in a volatile, violent neighbourhood, and where dysfunction and bloodshed are common currency, the proclivity to remain civil and open to one another diminishes in strength.