Quickly for the last point, when I was director of Yazda in Iraq for a period of one year, some of our staff created that very program specifically for Yazidi women who had been enslaved and had survived. It wasn't the whole community, but it was done with the Baghdad government through their directorate of women's protection and ministry of social affairs. It's a special card that gives them a monthly stipend for the rest of their lives; even if they leave the country and come back they will continue to get it. Any woman who was enslaved qualified for that.
Those kinds of programs could be expanded. What's bigger is that Yazidis don't just need continual handouts. We can rebuild the Yazidi economy. We did this by taking chickens and sheep and other things to Sinjar for families who had returned. They will start to survive and rebuild their homes. We should focus on reconstruction, not these indefinite cash handouts. We can help them build their lives.
For the geopolitical question, here's the problem: It is a fractured country with many players. Turkey has 20 military bases inside the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq right now. The KDP is a proxy of Turkey. The other side of the KRG alone, the PUK in Sulaymaniyah, is an ally of Iran. Iran also has influence in Baghdad. A lot of the small proxy militias that are active in these disputed territories are loyal to one of those different sides. The alignments get very complex. I've written diagrams and mappings of that in the past.
The U.S. relationship with Turkey is very poor right now. The relationship with Iran doesn't exist, and our President has made sure it will get worse. That seems like a no-go area right now. I don't think we can create stability in Iraq by asking other regional partners to change their approach. Those regional partners are themselves competitors with each other.
I think we should exploit the relationships Canadian, U.S. and European governments have with Baghdad and the Kurdistan region to promote our own policy; the policy being saving these minorities.
I'm not talking about a major geopolitical strategy that has to do with interests for our countries that would look like neo-imperialism or colonialism. I'm talking about the need to help this tapestry of diversity survive in Iraq, so when it comes to making sure Yazidis can stay in their homeland instead of continuing to migrate to Germany and Canada and elsewhere, we can work directly with those partners and push that agenda, which is our agenda.