YAZIDI BOY: ‘I’M VERY THANKFUL’
Reunited with his mother after ISIL captivity
The photo was heart-stopping when it first surfaced in July: a little boy, skinny as a thread, covered in dust and grime and dried blood and clutching a water bottle, as he sat in the front of a pickup truck.
We learned that he had been rescued from ISIL by Iraqi forces. We learned that his name was Emad Mishko Tamo, and that he was 12 years old and had been separated from his family since 2014.
We learned that his mother, Nofa Zaghla, was living in Winnipeg, a Yazidi refugee from a war-rocked corner of northern Iraq.
She was shocked by the image of a son she had mourned, fearing he was dead.
She had four younger children. Her husband and another son were still lost. Canadian immigration officials pledged to expedite Emad’s entry into Canada. And then, on Thursday morning at the Winnipeg airport, a different image emerged.
A little boy, his brown hair bleached from the sun, dressed in white shoes and blue jeans and a white shirt and sporting a toothy grin, stepping from a plane and into a room crowded with people — reporters and wellwishers and his mother, who squeezed him tight and wept great tears.
Emad is still recovering from bullet wounds. The emotional scars he carries from his time as an ISIL captive must surely cut deep. But on Thursday he was just a little boy with his mom. Flipping and catching a white teddy bear, walking through a crowded airport and into a new life.
“I’m happy,” Emad told reporters through a translator in a video of the reunion broadcast on CBC. “I’m very thankful for anyone that had any part in me reuniting with my mom.”
Emad was brought to Winnipeg through the efforts of the Yazidi Association of Manitoba.
Hadji Hesso, the association’s president, said that upon arrival at the airport, the boy was taken to a private room to reconnect with his family prior to walking out to the waiting crowd.
“As soon as he opened the door, he kind of (said) ‘Wow!’ and he ran to his mother, with hugging and kissing and his mother started crying.
“It was emotional for everybody.”
The Yazidi Association of Manitoba, the Kurdish Initiative for Refugees and Winnipeg Friends of Israel went public with Emad’s story last month to try to get Canadian officials to act quickly to bring the boy to Canada.
Officials were told that Zaghla lived peacefully with her husband and six children in Iraq until the summer of 2014, when their village was attacked.
They were held captive for two years, during which time Zaghla was forced to serve as a sex slave to the militants.
As they were moved from place to place, she became separated from her husband and her two oldest sons, and when she managed to escape with four of her children during an attack on their compound, she made her way to Canada with no expectation she would see them again.
Her husband — Emad’s father — as well as one of Emad’s brothers remain unaccounted for, Hesso said.