Citizenship and Immigration Committee on July 19th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Good morning. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on June 16, 2016, the committee will resume its study on immigration measures for the protection of vulnerable groups.

Please note that because of the sensitive nature of the committee's study, as we hear from witnesses during the course of our study, the content of some witnesses' testimony may be upsetting to participants and the viewing public.

The first panel appearing before us today are human rights activist Ms. Nadia Murad; Mr. Murad Ismael, executive director for Yazda; Mr. Mirza Ismail, from the Yezidi Human Rights Organization International; and, joining us by video conference from Vancouver, Mr. David Berson, co-chair of the Or Shalom Syrian Refugee Initiative.

I would like to thank all of the witnesses for appearing before us today on this very important study. I would like to remind witnesses that they have seven minutes for opening statements.

I will begin with Ms. Nadia Murad.

[Nadia Murad Basee Taha, Human Rights Activist, As an Individual]

Good morning, everyone.

I'm very happy today to be in a country like Canada and to be among you this morning. I'd like to thank you for your support of minorities who are subjected to criminal acts committed against them. I'd like also to thank you for the good work that you are doing for our cause. I'd like to thank Michelle, Rona, and everyone who stands for the truth.

My name is Nadia Murad. I am from the Yazidi minority. I'm 22 years old. I lived in Sinjar, in northern Iraq, in one of the Yazidi villages, the village of Kocho. I was a student in the fifth class. I was so happy with the life among my family and friends. In the village we lived peacefully, and as a peaceful society we lived together with the Muslims, in Bashiqa, in Bahzani, and also with the Christians. With everybody, basically all the other minorities, we coexisted peacefully.

On August 3, 2014, ISIL attacked the Yazidis. They killed more than 4,000 members of the Yazidi community, and as well there were explosions. More than 4,000 Yazidi individuals ran to the mountains on one of the hottest days of the year and more than 6,000 women and children were taken as hostages. Simply because of our religious identity, ISIL acted with the Yazidis in a very different way from the other minorities because they consider them to be infidels or kafirs. When they were attacked, the goal of ISIL was to destroy the Yazidi identity, to kill all the men and to take girls and children as hostages. That's what happened to me.

I was in the village, along with more than 1,700 individuals, and we were seized for two weeks under the control of ISIL. We asked for help from all sides because we knew that our destiny would be for the men to be killed and for the women and children to be taken hostage. We asked for help, but unfortunately we did not get help. On August 15, they gathered us at the village school, they separated the men from the women. They killed our men. More than 700 men in a matter of two hours were killed in the village of Kocho. We saw our fathers, our brothers, and our sons getting killed at the outskirts of the village.

Then they took us, the women and children, and they divided us up by age. Girls from the age of 9 to 25 or 27 years were taken to Mosul. As for the older women, more than 80 of them, they were killed because they were older. The male children were taken to the training camps. The married women who had more than three children each were taken to a different location. They acted towards them just like the girls, but after 40 days they basically violated them because they were with the Yazidis. This is what happened as far as my village is concerned.

This is the same story that was repeated in hundreds of other Yazidi villages, where thousands of people were killed in Sibaya, in Gir Azêr, and in Hardan. In all the other Yazidi villages, thousands of Yazidi people in Bashiqa and Bahzani had to be displaced.

When they took us, the girls and children, we were not simply held prisoners, but they committed crimes against us. They forced us to change our religion. They raped us. They sold us. They leased us. This continues today against more than 3,000 women and children in Iraq and Syria. There is no place in Iraq or Syria under the control of ISIL where girls were not distributed. Girls who were 10 years old were in my company and they would be raped, and they would be sold among themselves. Until today, some girls continue to be raped by tens of ISIL members, This is not a secret; it's done in public. ISIL videographs the girls, and they're proud of what they are doing toward those girls.

Thousands of other Yazidis in the camps struggle with extreme poverty. Thousands of Yazidis had to migrate. Hundreds drowned in the Aegean Sea. Thousands of widows in camps are not able to raise their children. More than 35 mass graves have been discovered so far in the areas that have been liberated in Sinjar, and they have not been documented to date. With the grave where my mother is buried, for more than nine months I knew that my mother was buried there, but she has not been properly identified. Imagine human beings having to see more than six or seven of their siblings killed and not be able to even go to collect their remains. You see your mother killed with no guilt other than her Yazidi identity that meant others considered her an infidel.

We're talking about not being able to buy a container of milk for the children in the camps in Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Iraqi Kurdistan. The Yazidis are being eliminated. Since August 3, 2014, no Yazidi child is being helped by any side. Yazidis are not getting help from anyone.

We're talking about girls who have been raped tens of times, and they're currently in the camps of Iraqi Kurdistan. They've lost their mothers, their fathers, and their brothers. They are living just like other refugees in the camps after having been the victims of ISIL, but they're not receiving any help or assistance. I know of girls who have been liberated. They're in the camps, but there is nobody to help them.

As Yazidis, we feel that the world is negligent toward us, especially when it comes to the survivors, the widows, and the orphans. We do not know for how long we will continue to be in this situation where we're being killed off.

The campaign to eliminate us continues. About this time two years ago, I was a student. I was on a vacation from studies, but I was a student. I was getting ready to go to grade 6, and during my vacation I was preparing myself by studying so that I would get good grades once I made it to grade 6. But 15 days after that we were attacked by ISIS or ISIL. I could not even see my books. I had hoped to be able to obtain the certificate from my school so that I could show it to my mother, but I was not able to get the certificate from that school. In that very schooI, I got separated from my family and friends and village residents. I did not even have the chance to say goodbye to my mother. Six of my siblings were in the school. They had been going to that school, and I saw them being taken in cars to face death. I did not even have the chance to say goodbye to them.

For more than a year our children have been brainwashed in the ISIL camps, and the world is silent about this. Frankly speaking, I don't know what else to tell you about this kind of suffering, about the very painful cases that I witnessed among young women and children. The whole world is negligent when it comes to standing up for the rights of the Yazidis. We are a peaceful community that has been subjected to more than 74 genocides, and we continue to put up with this genocide. It's our hope that one day the world would feel for our situation and would see how a peaceful community like us is facing genocide for no reason other than being of a different religion. We only want to live peacefully. That's the only thing we want. There is no one in the world who would accept that their daughter be held as a hostage for more than a year at the hands of terrorists or to see a wife being taken hostage by terrorists. For women, their husbands were killed before their very eyes, and they were taken hostage and then they were raped.

When I was besieged I heard that thousands of girls had been taken as hostages. I thought, well, maybe they would take me as a hostage, and perhaps I would try to reason with them, try to convince them that I am a human being, that I have done nothing to deserve to be raped, to be sold for nothing. I thought I would try to reason with ISIL because they are human beings, but when they took me away they did not give me any chance to say anything, to say that I was a young girl, that I had the right to live. When ISIL did not give me the chance, did not want to hear from me, I said I was going to talk to the world, and the world would understand me. For more than six months I went to more than 17 countries, talking to presidents, to parliamentarians, and other people, and saying, “Listen up, we're talking about girls who are being raped in the jails of ISIL, people who are dying of starvation in the camps, thousands of children who have been deprived of education.” And they were just simply silent, quiet about it, quiet about our right as Yazidis.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Ms. Murad, for this very difficult testimony.

Mr. Ismael, you have seven minutes for your testimony.

[Murad Ismael, Executive Director, Yazda, As an Individual]

Mr. Chair, honourable members of Parliament, ladies, and gentlemen, it's an honour for me to be here and to testify after a remarkable woman whom I have been with for the past seven months, and I see her tragedy every day. With every speech she gives, she gives some of her soul. She gives so many of her emotions to pass on the story of thousands of people like herself, thousands of children who become orphans, thousands of women who are enslaved; the story of men, like her own brother whom I met a week ago, who is still waiting for his wife who was taken by a militant from the Islamic State.

After listening to Nadia give this testimony that is so deep, it's hard to put my own testimony into words. In fact, I've been having a very hard time to put my own testimony into words for the past two years. I'm a geophysicist who came from Sinjar, who had a normal life in Houston, going to the University of Houston to receive an education. I received two master's degrees, in geophysics and engineering, and I wanted to have a normal life in the U.S., but that normal life changed in one moment. That normal life changed for me, for my family, and for every Yazidi on this planet.

What happened to the Yazidi people was a genocide, and the purpose of this genocide was to wipe the Yazidi people from the face of the planet. ISIS members said in Dabiq, their journal, that the purpose of this attack was to wipe out the Yazidis. In fact, they said that the existence of the Yazidis within the Muslim world was a shame on Islam, and that Muslims should have eradicated the Yazidis in the past.

A community of 700,000 people, a community that is more than 4,000 years old, coming from the history of Mesopotamia, of which we are all proud, the history of Babylon, the history of the Assyrians, a community whose heritage we all should be proud of, is now finding itself at a crossroads. When we say that we don't know what the future will look like for us, we indeed mean it. When we say that the Yazidis will probably be wiped out in 10 or 20 years, we mean it. The Yazidis had more than 200,000 people in Turkey and now there are only 300 families in Turkey. In Syria, we had 50,000 people, and now we have 3,000 people. In the Shekhan District, we had 200,000 or 300,000 people, and now we have 100,000 people. That's also for the city of Sinjar, where the majority basically systematically changed the demographics so the Yazidis would not have a homeland.

The ISIS attack on the Yazidis was the last straw, the last attack to wipe the Yazidis from the Middle East. It has been recognized by the United Nations. It has been recognized by other countries. It has been documented through my work, through all work. In Dohuk, we received more than 900 women like Nadia, and we have their accounts and they all faced the exact same thing that Nadia faced. In fact, Nadia was lucky compared to others. I met girls who were eight years old, who were raped. I met children who came back from captivity, who still pray the way the Daesh trained them to pray. Just a week ago, I met five beautiful women with their children, none of them older than seven, eight, or 10 years old, and they've all lost their husbands. Two of the girls, Gelan and Jihan, committed suicide in captivity. Two older children, Rizan and another one of their children, who were students at the medical school in Mosul, were killed when ISIS attacked.

What the Yazidis need from the world is a stand for humanity. The Yazidis must be seen as human beings, not seen as a distant community that must face this alone. I think for us as human beings looking at this tragedy and not doing anything is a shame on us, all of us.

This is what we would like Canada to do. First, we were surprised that the resolution that was put on the floor was objected to, that the genocide against the Yazidi people was not recognized in Parliament.

We were surprised that a country like Canada would not see our tragedy. It's very important to the thousands of people who survived that they get recognition from the Canadian people and the Canadian government. As Parliament is the voice of the Canadian people, we would like that resolution to pass. We would like that resolution to be reintroduced.

We are also here because we have thousands of people who put their lives at risk to immigrate. We would like Canada to have a quota for the Yazidis, between 5,000 and 10,000 people, who could immigrate to Canada. They are beautiful people. Trust me that they will contribute to the success and democracy of your country. They will be a good part of this country. You have about 2,000 to 3,000 Yazidis here in Canada, and they are integrated into the community in Canada.

We would like this quota to be especially for the victims, like the German program that brought in 1,100 women and girls who were victims of rape.

For people who are in Turkey now, waiting for the UN process is not a solution. The Yazidis, even when they are very lucky and have a few dollars to go to the interview, have to wait until 2022 to be interviewed for the first time through the UN system. Leaving the Yazidis in this situation is not the right solution.

We would like you to have a special quota of 5,000 to 10,000 people, sponsored by the Government of Canada, to allow the Yazidis to come. I think the Yazidis must be allowed to go to any country, exactly as the people of the Holocaust were. The world finally recognized their genocide and allowed them to come in.

Those are my two main points.

The last point is to help the Yazidi communities that stay in the camps. Help the Yazidi community refer its case to the International Criminal Court. We have asked the world to look into these crimes, to look into these mass graves, and there has still been no investigation. We would like Canada to take the lead on the ICC case, to take the lead on the documentation of the genocide, and to take the lead on immigration.

Thank you so much for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Ismael.

Mr. Ismail, you have seven minutes, please.

[Mirza Ismail, Chairman, Yezidi Human Rights Organization International]

Distinguished gentlemen, honourable Chair Borys, committee members, and honoured guests. I am honoured to be here. Thank you for this opportunity to speak at the CIMM meeting on the situation of the Yazidi refugees in Turkey, Syria, and Greece and of the IDP in northern Iraq.

I also would like to thank our Canadian government for recognizing and actually declaring last June that ISIS committed genocide after the UN declared it so. I would like to thank our government for declaring that.

Yazidis are indeed the victims of genocide. The Yazidi are an ancient and proud people from the heart of Mesopotamia, the base place of civilization and the base place of many of the world's religions. We believe in a supreme God and in God's seven archangels. Yazidi is a religion, a culture, and a language.

Yazidis are desperately in need of your immediate help and support. During our 6,000 years of history, the Yazidi have faced 74 genocides in the Middle East, including the ongoing genocide. Why? It is simply because we are non-Muslims. Yes, some of you may say, there are many, even Shia Muslims, facing this. This conflict has been between Shia and Sunni for centuries, but when they commit genocide against us, they do it because we are non-Muslims, because we are Yazidi.

We are considered infidels in sharia law, or what they call “the people without book”, whether it is Yazidis, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, etc. They are encouraged to kill, rape, enslave, and convert us.

On June 23, 2016, in the Skaramagas refugee camp in Greece, the Arabs, Kurds, and Afghans called a jihad to kill the Yazidis in the camp. These Muslim jihadists attacked the Yazidi refugees with knives, metal bars, sticks, and stones. They injured 18 Yazidi men who tried to defend their families and their people. The 18 injured men were taken to the hospital for medical treatment. They also ravaged their tents and belongings. The attack started at 9:30 p.m. and ended at 3:00 a.m. on June 24. This is not the first attack against the Yazidi refugees in Greece. There have been attacks and violence against the Yazidi refugees in Greece, in Turkey, in Syria, and even in Germany, many times, by ISIS supporters or ISIS members in those countries.

There are about 750 Yazidi refugees in Skaramagas camp. In total there are about 3,363 Yazidi refugees in Greece. This is happening in Greece despite the fact that Greece is not a Muslim country. What about countries like Turkey or Syria? If that could happen in Greece, you can imagine what is happening. You can see on the screen pictures of the victims of the attack by ISIS members or supporters in Greece.

Most of the staff of the UNHCR in Turkey and Syria are Muslims and they violently discriminate against the Yazidi, who do not dare protest their ill treatment or demand their rights. They are given four to five years for a UN interview. I have evidence I am happy to show anyone who wants to see it.

There are thousands of Yazidi refugees currently languishing in Turkey, Syria, and Greece. At the top of the threatened and persecuted list are Yazidis, then come Chaldo-Assyrians and Mandaeans. More than 5,000 Yazidi were murdered by ISIS in August 2014, and more than 3,000 are still enslaved, mostly young women and children.

Humanitarian aid, while necessary, is not sufficient. Much of the humanitarian aid distributed by the Kurdish regional authority and the Iraqi government never gets into the hands of those who need it, those for whom it was intended, because of skimming, corruption, and politics.

If humanitarianism is the chief reason being cited in accepting the refugees, they should receive priority simply because they are the most vulnerable and persecuted in the Middle East, and they are the ones who have nowhere else to go.

There are thousands of young Yazidi women, girls, and children who as I speak have been enslaved and forced into sexual slavery. These girls are subjected to daily, multiple rapes by ISIS monsters. According to many escaped women and girls I met within northern Iraq, the abducted Yazidis, mostly young women and children, numbered more than 7,000 at the beginning. Some of those women and girls have had to watch seven-, eight-, and nine-year-old children bleed to death before their eyes after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day. I met mothers, whose children were torn from them by ISIS. These same mothers came to plead for the return of their children only to be informed that they, the mothers, had been fed with the flesh of their own children—children murdered, then fed to their own mothers.

ISIS militia have burned many Yazidi girls alive for refusing to convert and marry ISIS men. Young Yazidi boys are being trained to be jihadists and suicide bombers. The entire Yazidi population of Mount Sinjar was displaced in less than one day, on August 3, 2014.

On August 2, 2014, on the eve of the ISIS attack against the Yazidis in Sinjar region, more than 10,000 of the local authority's forces were present, allegedly there to protect the Yazidis. The Yazidis tried desperately to flee for their lives to Mount Sinjar, but the KRG militias didn't allow it. At about 10 p.m. they escaped back to the KRG region, and they refused to give any weapons to Yazidis to defend themselves against ISIS.

They trapped the children and women. For them it became a waiting room for death and carnage at the hands of ISIS. The Yazidis who begged and pleaded for weapons to save themselves and their people were killed like dogs by peshmergas. Thousands of men were killed on the spot, including hundreds who were beheaded. The UN estimates that 5,000 Yazidis were murdered and thousands of women and children taken hostage.

Today I am pleading with each and every one of you in the name of humanity to lend us your support at this crucial time to save the indigenous and peaceful peoples of the Middle East: the Yazidis, the Chaldo-Assyrians, and the Mandeans.

Our demand of the Canadian government is to bring as many Yazidi refugees from Turkey, Syria, and Greece as possible, because they are the most vulnerable group and their lives are in danger. If the Yazidis can be attacked in Greece, how about the Yazidi refugees in Turkey and Syria, which are Muslim countries?

We ask Canada to bring in the abducted Yazidis who were able to escape from ISIS. Canada can bring those escaped Yazidi girls from Iraq under section 25 of the immigration law. As my colleague said, Germany has accepted 1,000 who are underaged with their families, so why can Canada not do that?

We ask the Canadian government to be the leading hand in rescuing the more than 3,000 Yazidis who are still being held in captivity by ISIS in Iraq and Syria and in monitoring the ISIS borders so that ISIS doesn't transport them to other countries. Humanitarian aid must be sent immediately and directly to those internally displaced Yazidis, and especially to the Yazidis in Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. The KRG has put food sanctions on the Yazidis there. There is an imminent threat of starvation, dehydration, and disease.

We ask our government to intervene with the Iraqi government and support the creation of an autonomous region for the Yazidi Chaldo-Assyrians in Sinjar and the Nineveh plain under the protection of international forces and directly tied to Baghdad's central government. This right is guaranteed under the Iraqi constitution, article 125. It needs implementation. This is the only way we can survive in our homeland in the Middle East.

Thank you so much for listening and for your careful consideration going forward. We beseech you to act with the greatest urgency to help save the remnants of our Yezidi nation of the Chaldo-Assyrians and other minorities who face the same thing. Only with your help, after we have experienced so much death and suffering, is there a possibility of a peaceful life going forward for our people.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Ismail.

Now we will go to Mr. David Berson.

[David Berson, Co-Chair, Or Shalom Syrian Refugee Initiative, Or Shalom Synagogue]

Good morning, members of the House of Commons standing committee and honoured witnesses. Thank you for the invitation to speak today.

Immigration is part of Canada's story. Refugees are part of Canada's story.

My name is David Berson. I'm a member of the Or Shalom Syrian refugee initiative. Or Shalom is an east-side Vancouver synagogue that has 180 members, is of modest means, and has a deep commitment to building community, pursuing social justice, and repairing the world.

Many of our members come from families of origin who have migrated, fled persecution and genocide, and experienced discrimination abroad as well as when arriving in Canada. We understand and appreciate how precious our lives are here, as Canadians, and welcome the efforts being made to improve our country's record of resettling immigrants, especially vulnerable refugees who are in inaccessible areas.

Our synagogue is sponsoring four families, including two families of four and five members in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, and one family of five in eastern Turkey. These families are Kurdish Syrians who have family members in metro Vancouver. Our fourth family is an LGBT couple, presently in Beirut. We do our work in partnership and collaboration with the United Church and Rainbow Refugee.

Eighteen months ago members of our synagogue, in partnership with our local Tibetan community, resettled two displaced Tibetan women who came from remote areas of northeastern India. Our group raised additional funds so that we could provide training grants for these new Canadians by embarking on a trek to those remote areas. We showed up so that they could show up.

The Old Testament mentions 30 times, do not ill-treat a stranger or oppress him, for you were once strangers in a strange land. “Sometimes”, said our former minister of justice, the Honourable Irwin Cotler, “you need to get a taste of injustice to have urgency to fight against it.”. Our community has done so countless times during our history in Canada, together with many other Canadians.

For the purpose of my presentation this morning, “vulnerable” means families whose lives have been disrupted too many times by traumatic transitions, families with young children living with critical health issues and dwindling resources, families in despair, such as Alan Abdul-Rahim, a toddler who had heart surgery at the age of one and requires stable and accessible medical care, or his father, Adnan, who suffers from a serious respiratory condition and is limited in his mobility and physical activity. A distant hope they have is of immigrating to Canada.

“Inaccessible” in our case refers to areas where our families reside, which is the Kurdish region of Iraq, areas apparently inaccessible to our IRCC and consular staff. According to the inter-agency information sharing portal for the Syrian regional refugee response, 249,395 refugees are in the Kurdish region of Iraq, including the regions of Erbil, Dohuk, and Sulaymaniyah. That's 88,772 households. That is the population of Gatineau, a stone's throw from where you sit today. Despite specific suggestions to the Honourable Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and despite opportunities to partner with the myriad agencies on the ground in northern Iraq, more than 100 individuals, Kurdish Syrian refugees, still await processing. These are individuals who are sponsored by families in metro Vancouver.

Dear standing committee members, there are more humanitarian and government organizations and agencies involved in operations and services than there are letters in the alphabet. In metro Vancouver, private sponsors have mobilized more than 3,000 people to participate in these resettlements. We've raised more than $775,000 and are prepared to do more. We've educated ourselves in terms of language, food, culture. We've been active long before November 2015 and we are ready to deploy.

Change is needed in how we expedite the processing of vulnerable populations in isolated areas. Here are some recommendations and possible solutions to consider.

Increase the number of private sponsorships allowed to sponsorship agreement holders because private sponsors significantly increase the acculturation process to Canada, even more so in cases where people are vulnerable and have special needs. Private sponsorships cost the government and taxpayers much less, and they develop more resilient communities and stronger community networks.

Encourage support and collaboration with agencies in isolated areas such as northern Iraq.

Recognize internally displaced people as candidates for sponsorship.

Take the UNHCR and the IOM to interview these folks to get the ball rolling.

Accept the UNHCR's designation in places where we, as Canadians, do not have processing centres. If we cannot send personnel, then interview the people by telephone.

Use existing UNHCR refugee cap mechanisms to accelerate security processing and vulnerability assessment. UNHCR has already introduced a digitalized protection monitoring tool to assess for vulnerability and identify needs, and 99% of the people in the camps have been scanned for these records.

Prioritize cases by expediting the ones that have the most sponsors or the most people actively engaged in sponsorship in Canada.

Waive transportation loans for the most vulnerable refugees.

Rent special armoured personnel vehicles to transport Canadian staff so they can safely travel to this area and interview vulnerable families.

Finally, a rather irksome suggestion. On numerous occasions I've thought to myself, being a philanthropic adviser, that perhaps we could embark upon a fundraising campaign to help the IRCC.

We will support your efforts. Let our people go so that we can tell our children and yours that our values called out to us and we acted; so that we can say with pride that our Canadian team is on the ground, well aware of the dangers, taking the risks to save the lives of vulnerable people; so we can say that together with our government we made miracles happen.

Let us resolve that vulnerable refugees' lives matter. Let's resolve to do something.

Finally, I urge you to be decisive in your deliberations and recommendations. Irwin Cotler said of the present crisis and the inaction of the world community that “We are living in the time of bystander leadership.” Let us not be bystanders. Let us enact the responsibility to protect. As our sages taught, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Berson.

We'll now proceed to the round of questions to the witnesses.

Mr. Tabbara, you have seven minutes.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you to all the witness for being here today. The tragic events that keep unfolding in Iraq and Syria are very disturbing.

I want to thank Nadia Murad for her bravery and for raising awareness around the world of the plight of the Yazidis. The UN Secretary, Ban Ki-moon, has spoken of your strength and your courage and your dignity, all of which were witnessed here.

Ms. Murad, you mentioned during your recent appearance at the UN, and here today, that you lived in peace and that you were happy, and that you did not want to be a refugee. There are currently more than 3 million displaced in Iraq, many of whom are in the northern region of Kurdistan. Their local government has publicly spoken about the funding deficiencies, and with the recent flare-up in Fallujah there has been much conflict going on there.

I have an article here from Al Jazeera, from Shaker Mahmoud Hadi. Some of the things he mentioned in this article are that in Fallujah right now it's really a catastrophe, that the resources are not enough, and we can provide for only 30% of the displaced. Hadi called upon the international community to help the Iraqi government in dealing with the internally displaced people.

This is what the committee is here today to talk about, the IDPs and how we can better assist them.

The current Government of Canada has increased its humanitarian aid for Iraq to an unprecedented level of $1.6 billion. It provides training and troops fighting Daesh, including helping the peshmerga forces, and it is working with local governments for stabilization and development.

This is to Ismail. Would you say that this government's whole-of-government approach, including diplomacy, humanitarian aid, political negotiations, and training, is a good way to ensure long-term peace in Iraq?

[Mirza Ismail]

I think, as you said about the IDPs, especially who are in northern Iraq, you can help, but at the same time, they should not deal just with the government. The aid that goes to the government doesn't reach the people who need it.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

The humanitarian aid you mean?

[Mirza Ismail]

Yes, humanitarian aid, medical aid. You can send teams—we have many in Canada and in the U.S.—or work with other NGOs to make sure that the aid actually reaches the people. We have many people, and they scream. Some of them don't have two meals a day. On the other hand, all is politics. If I am not affiliated with one of the politics there, I am lost, and they don't give me.... You have to do something. We hope that the international community can send direct aid with the people from here, from the United States, from Europe, to make sure that the aid actually reaches the people.

In September 2014, and November, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a Hindu Guruji, donated about 110 tonnes of food and clothing. He went with the food and the aid there, to make sure that the people received it. On the other hand, they give some to government, and the government distributes probably less than 10% of it. As soon as the officials leave, the government takes the rest. They don't tell you that, but they give you the picture when they distribute that less than 10%. The aid doesn't reach them.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

What I'm getting from you is that you're saying that there's a lot of corruption—

[Mirza Ismail]

There is a lot of corruption.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

—and the aid that's being sent is not directed to people who need it the most.

[Mirza Ismail]

That's right, yes.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

What kind of suggestions would you give Canada and the international community to make sure that the aid that we have increased recently does reach the people and does go to the people who need help?

[Mirza Ismail]

We suggest that, whether you are in Canada, the U.S., or Europe, you work with the community here, in the U.S., or in Europe. Most of them are Canadian citizens, U.S. citizens, or European citizens, so they can go there. We are willing and more than happy to be volunteers with Canada or whoever wants to send the aid. We are willing to do it and we are more than happy to do it to make sure that the innocent people, the people who are suffering, receive this aid. Work with the community to make sure that the aid is going to be received by the people who need it.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

There's been talk in our government about having a trip in the fall to go to northern Iraq. There have been issues raised, concerns about individual safety if Canadians travel abroad. How is the situation there?

[Mirza Ismail]

The situation is not safe. The problem is, when Canadian officials or the U.S. officials or whoever goes there, they are accompanied by security forces, military. You are asking me if everything is okay, but there are four armed men behind you pointing a gun at me, so what do you expect me to tell you? I hope you understand my point.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

I understand what you're saying.

[Mirza Ismail]

The humanitarian aid should be sent directly...they should work with the individual community, whether Yazidi, Assyrian, Baha'i, Kakais, and work with northern Iraq to make sure that aid reaches the people who need it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Tabbara.

Ms. Rempel, seven minutes, please.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

To Mirza, Murad, and Nadia, it's my understanding that the UN is not practically prioritizing Yazidi refugees. Is that correct?