Yazidi boy gets to meet Trudeau

A Yazidi boy who was held captive for three years by Iraqi militants got his wish to meet with Justin Trudeau, simply by showing up to the prime minister’s town hall meeting in Winnipeg.

Thirteen-year-old Emad Mishko Tamo made a video appeal to Trudeau that was posted to social media by the Yazidi Association of Manitoba last month.

But a spokesman for the group says they never heard back from Trudeau, and decided to try to see him at the forum at the University of Manitoba on Wednesday.

Hadji Hesso says when Emad arrived at the venue with his uncle, political staffers approached him and brought him to a dressing room, where he met Trudeau for about five minutes.

Emad was reunited with his family in Winnipeg last year after a relative saw his picture, taken in a refugee camp, on social media.

Hesso says they’d hoped for a much longer meeting with Trudeau, so Emad could talk more about the plight of other Yazidi children and bringing more refugees to Canada.

“It was not the meeting that we were looking for,” said Hesso, who is a spokesman for the family. “But hopefully this is just the beginning.”

“We requested a further meeting, another meeting, to discuss more details — if possible in Ottawa — but nothing has been confirmed yet.”

Emad was separated from his family after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant displaced thousands of members of the Kurdish-minority Yazidis in 2014. He was freed last summer in the city of Mosul.

In the Yazidi Association’s video, Emad held up a sign thanking Canada for helping him.