TORONTO — It’s fair to say that until news agencies started taking the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) seriously, few people had heard of the Yezidi people. Or of the Chaldeans, the Assyrians or the Syriac, for that matter.
But as far as Mirza Ismail is concerned, they all share pretty much the same fate: they are non-Muslim minorities – considered infidels – living in Syria and Iraq, facing discrimination, forced conversion, sex slavery, mass rape and even death.
Ismail is an ethnic Yezidi, a member of an ancient people whose tradition states that they have lived in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, for more than 6,700 years. They practise one of the world’s oldest religions, but they have been oppressed and murdered in large numbers for generations. Ismail said the Yezidis have suffered 74 genocides over the centuries and have seen their number reduced from a high of 23 million to about two million, worldwide, today.
With the rise of the Islamic State, they have seen their ancestral lands occupied, their men slaughtered, their young women and girls made into sex slaves – bought and sold in markets – and their young boys kidnapped and raised to be jihadis.
It’s a gruesome fate, one that the wider world has come to learn about as the Islamic State makes no effort to hide the mass executions and rapes that it perpetrates.
Ismail, who lives in the Greater Toronto Area, is looking for help. He’s found some with a few Jewish activists who have formed a small support group called Canadian Jews and Friends of Yezidis.
A chance encounter last August led to formation of the group, said Rananah Goldhar, one of its founders. Following a rally at the Israeli Consulate on Bloor Street, some of the participants headed down to Queen’s Park, where another rally was being held in support of Christians being persecuted in the Middle East.
They met a group of Yezidis taking part in that protest. Through them, they met Ismail, and soon after, the support group was formed.
“We were shocked when they told us that their women had just been kidnapped and there was a massacre in Iraq of their people,” Goldhar said.
“I struggled with getting involved, but finally God answered my question: How can I work and take care of family and volunteer for Israel and be involved with the Yezidi effort? And God answered that you cannot be a Jew without weeping and running to help the Yezidis,” she said.
Canadian Jews and Friends of Yezidis is sponsoring a speaking engagement by Ismail titled “Yezidis speak,” on April 12 at 7:30 p.m. at the B’nai Brith building at 15 Hove St.
It has also posted a petition online, calling for Parliament to “provide military air cover and equipment to help the Yezidis stranded on Mount Sinjar [in Iraq]; bring to Canada as refugees some of the Yezidis who have been captured, raped, enslaved, and others who have survived their loved ones being killed; rescue women and children who were captured and enslaved by ISIS.”
Ismail, chair of Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International, was in Ottawa recently, where he made a pitch for increased Canadian aid for Yezidi refugees.
Just before that, he was in New York to meet officials of the United Nations, to press the Yezidi case for support.
The Canadian government can help with more humanitarian aid, by bringing refugees to Canada and by supplying arms to Yezidi fighters who are outgunned when facing heavily armed Islamic State personnel, he said.
Ismail believes the Jewish community should empathize with the Yezidis’ fate, given their own tragic history of suffering genocide, and because Israelis well understand the kind of neighbourhood they live in. Israel has already aided the Yezidis with humanitarian assistance, but providing arms would help the 4,000 Yezidi fighters defend their community from ISIS jihadis, he said.
Ismail was in northern Iraq recently, near the border with Turkey, where he met Yezidi refugees. They have been living in tents or out in the open since last August, when Islamic State attacks forced Yezidis out of their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs. They found refuge on Mount Sinjar, but many were killed, abducted, raped and sold, he said. His own nieces, ranging in age from nine to 15, suffered that fate, he added.
Altogether, 10,000 Yezidis have been killed in the latest round of atrocities, and another 7,450 have been abducted. About 400 young women managed to escape their captors and find refugee in Yezidi areas, but they suffer from trauma, he said.
The Yezidi community in Canada is hardly equipped to help them. There are only about 50 families across the country, with the largest numbers in London (30 families), Winnipeg (20-25) and the GTA (10).
Ismail himself fled the region in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.
There are about 23,000 Yezidi refugees living in Turkey and another 7,000 or 8,000 in Syria.
“Why not bring the Yezidi [to Canada] now?” he asked. “They will not be of harm to Canada. They are not a missionary religion… Canada would be assured that this religion would not harm the Canadian people,” he said.