‘NEVER FAR FROM FORGETTING’
A GLIMPSE INTO THE LIVES OF YAZIDI WHO’VE FOUND REFUGE IN CANADA
A glimpse into the lives of Yazidi who’ve found refuge in Canada
LIKE A SPOTLIGHT IS TRAILING HIM,
Hayder Essw weaves in and out of a crowd of about 150 gathered for the Yazidi festival Rejiet Ezi in the basement of the United Church in Richmond Hill, Ont. He’s dressed no differently from many of the men in attendance, in traditional Yazidi clothing with a red-and-white checkered
jamadani headscarf. Approaching middle age, with lines on his cheeks but a youthful spring in his walk, Essw greets politicians, supporters and children alike with his wide smile, melting eyes and a warm handshake.
The tables he passes are covered in candies and gooey cakes that after three days of fasting, the Yazidi partygoers eat as a boon before their main meal. Married women, some in traditional Yazidi dress, others sporting classic Western evening attire, grip each other’s hands as they lean in and catch up. From the kitchen, aromas of
dolma, a Middle Eastern stuffed leaf dish, and warm lamb fill the room. Essw’s son Araz fumbles with a boom with a camera tacked on the end to film the dancing that will soon follow; all the while, the young hug and kiss each other’s cheeks.
Rejiet Ezi, one of the most important celebrations in Yazidi culture, occurs around December 14. The date changes each year and is calculated on the Yazidi calendar, which by some elders’ accounts may be one of the first calendars in existence (it starts on a Wednesday in mid-april). An oral tradition, Yazidi spirituality and customs are retained by only a few, and so many at the event are uncertain what Rejiet Ezi is really about. Essw’s brother, Zuher, says that since Rejiet
Ezi comes near the longest night of the year, or winter solstice, “we fast, as if to remind ourselves of the winters of our lives. We pray for the sun and then we feast, assured that light is returning to the bareness of Earth.”
On this night, Essw is the light, the patriarch of Toronto’s Yazidi community. His family was the first to arrive in this city in 2009, but not the first in Canada. Until recently, about 50 families had settled around London, Ont., having left the Nineveh plains in Iraq where the Yazidi have lived for thousands of years. But in the past three years, about 1,200 more Yazidi have joined them in Canada, sponsored as United Nations refugees, survivors of the 2014 genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (known as ISIL in the West, DAESH to Middle Easterners). Celebrations such
as this one in Richmond Hill are now being played out in rented community centres, churches and homes in cities across the country, particularly Calgary and Edmonton, where the federal government has placed the refugees. Alongside the food, the traditional Yazidi dance dilan and Middle Eastern hospitality, lives — like Rejiet Ezi itself — are emerging from darkness.
“We are never far from forgetting,” says Markaz Abi, a widow from the genocide raising her four young children in a small bungalow not far from the Richmond Hill church. Abi’s eyes are perennially swollen from tears and she clings to her cellphone that holds photos of 40plus dead relatives,
almost all young men. She repeats, “We are never far from forgetting what has happened to us.”
ESSW’S FATHER, HUSSINE, an elder and wisdom keeper, says the Yazidi trace their origins back to the beginning of Earth, specifically to the region along the Tigris-euphrates River often referred to as the birthplace of civilization. They consider themselves direct descendants of Adam. Many of their cultural practices provide glimpses into the spiritual beliefs of the earliest documented cultures. Despite reports that the Yazidi incorporate elements of the Persian spiritual practice Zoroastrianism, Sufi Islam and Christianity into their belief system, their spiritual leaders in the Yazidi Holy Land, Lalish, in northernmost Iraq, consider it the other way around. Monotheistic (with a belief that God and his archangels created Earth) and persecuted (they have faced 74 genocides), the Yazidi have passed on their knowledge to the others, says Hussine. Those who know Yazidi spirituality, its mysticism, belief in reincarnation and purification of the soul, see parallels in Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah and the teachings, meditation and miracles of Jesus Christ.
One thing is certain, though: “the most recent Yazidi genocide didn’t just target a people,” says Lyn May, chair of Richmond Hill’s United Church outreach committee, which provides help to the refugees. “This was an attempt by ISIL to eradicate our collective history.”
It was August 2014 at the end of
Chile Havine, or the Forty Days of Heat — another celebration that sees many Yazidi on holidays and back in their traditional home villages to honour their ancestors — when ISIL invaded Yazidi villages near the small city of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq. ISIL refer to the Yazidi as Abadat
Shaytan, or devil worshippers, explains Khalid Aboulela, a Sufiislamic scholar living in Canada.
Contemporary genocides against the Yazidi have been fuelled in part by their reverence to the archangel Tawuse Melek, also known as the Peacock Angel — many Yazidi homes have pictures of both Lalish and peacocks. In the Qur’an, the devil is described as an angel who refused God’s command to bow to Adam. And Tawuse Melek was such an angel. When God made Adam, he gathered his angels together and asked them to bow. All did, except Tawuse Melek, who said that he had made a vow to only bow to God. According to Yazidi belief, God made Tawuse Melek the chief of all angels.
ISIL, however, have taken Islamic stories of Iblis, the devil, and deduced it to be Tawuse Melek. “Based on their conclusion, they determined that the Yazidi deserved death and slavery,” he says, explaining where ISIL is drawing their rationale, albeit
‘ The most recent Yazidi genocide didn’t just target a people. This was an attempt by ISIL to eradicate our collective history.’
wrongly, for the most recent atrocities. “But the Prophet Muhammad said all people were to be treated with kindness and deserving of legal status and rights,” counters Aboulela. “All humans have souls.”
It’s estimated that as many as 5,000 Yazidi men were brutally killed and that ISIL abducted an estimated 6,000 Yazidi women and girls — to be married off to fighters or sold in sextrafficking operations. Younger children were taken, too, the girls to act as servants, the boys to be groomed as child soldiers. According to the UN, 3,000 Yazidi females are still thought to be in ISIS’S hands and thousands of males are still missing.
AS ORAL STORYTELLERS, the Yazidi are poetic, so it’s no surprise that Essw describes the persecution of his people as the winter of their souls. His own journey out of Iraq began in 2007, with his then eight-year-old son, Sheerzad. Sheerzad has an incurable disease — Epidermolysis bullosa,a rare genetic condition that results in the blistering of the skin and internal organs. Without treatment and as a cultural minority in Iraq, Sheerzad was unable to access proper medical care and was wasting away, his body covered in painful lesions.
Desperate, Essw took him to see a doctor at an American army base. Sheerzad was given some medication and began to show signs of recovery. Essw’s Arab neighbours became leery of his involvement with the Americans and labelled him a spy. Essw feared for his and his family’s safety. And for good reason. Around the same time, terrorists shot 23 Yazidi men travelling on a bus, and suicide bomb attacks were set off, likely by radicalized individuals who would go on to form ISIL in Iraq, in local Yazidi villages, claiming as many as 1,200 lives. “It was one of those moments I wish on no father,” says Essw. “I had to decide to leave my family to save them.”
Essw and Sheerzad left their village, Babira, near Mosul, in part on foot and in part crammed into battered cars with other refugees, until they managed to sneak through the Sinjar and Zagros mountains into Turkey.
In Turkey, Essw and Sheerzad were imprisoned and faced deportation as refugees. “But a prison guard asked me to tell my story,” explains Essw. “I said that no matter how many times Turkey tried to send us back, I would return. I would not stop until Sheerzad had a chance of living past the age of 10.” Essw’s story was well publicized after that, attracting the attention of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who helped Essw’s immediate family leave Iraq. After Sheerzad received the necessary care, the United Nations took over and settled the family in Toronto.
Essw and his family brought very little with them, but one spiritual token they could not do without was the Berat, which can be found in a white cotton bag in their Richmond Hill home. The Berat is soil culled from a cave called the Shikefa Berata
in Lalish. It’s believed that the Shikefa
Berata is from another planet, explains Imad Farhan, the son of Fawaz Farhan, a Yazidi author and historian living in Germany. The cave is opened once a year when the energy inside is said to have reached its peak.
“We say through the Berat our angels can hear us,” adds Essw’s father, Hussine. The Berat contains healing properties. “We believe in God and that he created his seven archangels and each has a specific task or duty,” continues Hussine. “When Earth was being formed, Gabriel came so close to the planet that the angel’s vibration altered its formation and that is how Earth got ready for humanity,” he says. “Gabriel is our messenger between humans and God.”
BACK IN TORONTO, at the Rejiet Ezi, Essw’s son Sheerzad, now 19, sits on stage while his father introduces the speakers for the evening. The boy is healthy, although still the size of a child. A Grade 12 student, he, like other Canadian boys his age, isn’t quite sure what he wants to do when he grows up, but he loves video games.
Mirza Ismail, head of the Torontobased Yezidi Human Rights Organization International, takes the microphone and talks about the courage of Nadia Murad, the young Yazidi woman from Kocho who first spoke about her abduction experience to the United Nations. Murad won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Congo’s Dr. Denis Mukwege for their work fighting sexual violence. Murad has a cousin in the room, Fatuma, who now lives in Toronto. A month earlier, Fatuma was sent a video from ISIL saying that her teenage brother was still alive and if she raised several thousand dollars, she could buy him back. Since that initial correspondence, Fatuma has heard nothing else and fears that her brother has been moved — or has died in recent shelling in Syria.
While these Yazidi are grateful to be safe in Canada — especially since the United States’ withdrawal from Syria unleashed Turkish forces against the U.S.’S former Kurdish allies near the Yazidi homeland and increased the threat of ISIL’S return in the region — the Yazidi who have arrived in Canada since 2016 say they have mixed feelings about their new country. Immigration has separated families, scattering sisters and children, mothers and grandfathers across various countries — Germany has accepted the largest number of Yazidi refugees — and camps for internally displaced people across Kurdistan.
There are efforts by the Canadian government to reunite immediate family members, but the pain of separation, given all the trauma this tightly knit community has experienced, is all-consuming. Furthermore, the Yazidi, who were largely small farmers and tradespeople, have to learn new trades, after first learning a new language, with children often quickly surpassing their parents in speaking English and navigating Canadian systems.
The Essw family spends most of their time, pro bono, shuffling Yazidi parents to teacher meetings, translating at doctors’ appointments, shopping for basic supplies and finding housing. Above all, the Yazidi need psychological trauma care. Most of the women have experienced multiple sexual assaults, beatings and humiliations. The children have seen family members butchered in front of them.
Two hundred years ago, Imad says, a Yazidi man named Mam Isso predicted there would be difficult times coming for the Yazidi. He had a prophecy of their pain and sorrow. He also predicted the whole world would hear about the Yazidi through Kocho, the home village of Murad and where the worst atrocities against the Yazidi were committed. While the Yazidi are scattered more than ever, questions have arisen as to whether their homeland will, anytime in the foreseeable future, be safe. It is ceremonies such as the Rejiet Ezi that are keeping this gentle, peaceful and important culture alive.