Canada looks to resettle 1,200 Yezidi refugees from Iraq, Syria

MONTREAL: The Canadian government unveiled plans on Tuesday to resettle 1,200 survivors of the IS’s violent campaign against religious minorities with a special focus on the Yezidis, a group that suffered severe brutalities.

A United Nations panel last year concluded the extremist group was guilty of committing genocide against Yezidis. Around 3,000 women and girls from the minority sect are estimated to be still IS captives and sex slaves in Iraq and Syria.

“We’ve always had a tradition of offering protection on the basis of vulnerability, not religion or ethnicity, as such, our response is focusing on all survivors of Daesh,” Canadian Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said, referring to the Arabic acronym for IS.

“Having said that, Yezidi people constitute the vast majority of the people that will be resettled as result of this initiative,” he told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday. The Yezidis are a Kurdish-speaking religious minority spread across northern Iraq and Syria, south-eastern Turkey and Armenia. They have repeatedly been victims of persecution over the centuries.

Thousands of Yezidi men were killed, while thousands of women and girls were carried off, bought and sold in slave markets, or forced into sexual slavery when IS forces overran their ancient homeland in the Sinjar province in northern Iraq in 2014.

The move by the Canadian government was welcomed by Nadia Murad, a Yezidi survivor of the IS sex trade who has become a vocal activist, working with lawyer Amal Clooney to bring attention to the issue and prosecute IS militants in courts.

Hussen, the minister, said asylum will be offered not only to women and girls, but also to boys who were victimised by IS.

Hussen, a former Somali refugee, said it is expected that nearly 400 government-assisted refugees were expected to arrive by Wednesday, which is 120 days from the date the House of Commons passed a unanimous motion calling on the government to bring in vulnerable Yezidi refugees.

Canada learned key lessons from a German campaign to resettle more than 1,000 Yezidi refugees to southwestern Germany, he said.