That's going to be a tough act to follow.
Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for inviting me here.
Just to introduce myself quickly, I'm actually an Ottawa-based freelance journalist. I'm not of Iraqi background myself, so I can't speak from a personal experience perspective; however, I'm a Syriac Orthodox Christian, which is a major denomination in Iraq, so I have lots of sources of information through that network.
For the past year, I have also been a volunteer with an organization based in Sweden called A Demand for Action, which was founded and is run by Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac Christians who have immigrated to Södertälje. I also have some Yazidi contacts through my journalistic work.
To talk about Christians, the Christian population of Iraq, as you probably know, was estimated to be 1.3 million before the fall of Saddam Hussein, but the numbers have been in free fall since then. A Catholic NGO, Aid to the Church in Need, issued a report about a year ago. They described the forced exodus of Christians from Iraq as “very severe”. This report also says there were 275,000 Christians in 2015, and in 2017 this dwindled to 150,000. According to the American magazine National Review, over half the country's Christians are internal refugees, and this report predicts that Christianity in Iraq could be effectively wiped out within 20 years if the population continues to decline at this precipitous rate.
Where are these internally displaced Christians? Living in UN-sponsored camps is not a viable option for these people. Many of my informants have repeatedly told me that it's virtually impossible for them to go to a UNHCR camp because they are attacked, intimidated and harassed by their fellow refugees just for being who they are. They have said that it's like a nightmare living there. I'd say it's something similar to LGBT refugees.
The organization I represent, A Demand for Action, has actually protested this in front of the UNHCR office in Beirut, Lebanon, but nothing has changed.
Until recently, these internally displaced Christians of Iraq were living in church-run camps and makeshift shelters. A colleague, journalist Jordan Allott, who is also a filmmaker based in Virginia, visited Iraq just this last September to film a documentary on persecuted Christians in different parts of the world, including Iraq. He has reported that, with diminishing financial support, the last church-run camp in Erbil, in the Kurdistan region, was dismantled, and these displaced Christians had nowhere to go.
Many of them are going back to their former homes in cities like Qaraqosh, which was once a thriving Christian city. Some of them are going because they have no option, but others feel very strongly that they have to go back and reclaim their homeland. To them, Mosul and the plains of Nineveh are sacred spaces. It's where they have practised.
They see themselves as a very distinct ethnocultural religious group, not as generic Christians who can be dispersed and continue their community and their language. They feel that their language, Aramaic, is a very precious legacy of Christianity because it's the language that Jesus himself spoke.
They fear a loss of culture and identity, and they have told me themselves that if they are scattered in diasporas all over the world, they will be lost as a culture and all traces of Christianity will be wiped out.
ISIS has already desecrated and destroyed many churches and historical manuscripts and made a good attempt to remove two millennia of Christianity in this region, but the challenges of returning home, as both these gentlemen have said, are not that simple. The challenges can be summed up as the need for guarantees: the right to equal citizenship under the rule of law, security and, economically, the ability to work and to raise a family in peace.
The churches in Iraq, all denominations, have been trying to coordinate reconstruction efforts and bring some hope to Nineveh's Christians. Much of this reconstruction work is carried out through the Nineveh Reconstruction Committee, an interdenominational organization.
Some of these denominations see the answer as creating a safe homeland for themselves similar to the Kurdistan region, but there are internal arguments and dissensions. Others see that as creating a Christian ghetto, and they would rather be part of the citizenry of Iraq.
Iraq's remaining Christians are appealing to western governments, including Canada, not only to help fund the reconstruction of the Nineveh plains, but also to use their power in both Baghdad and the Kurdistan region of Iraq to guarantee the security of all minorities, Christians, Yazidis and others as well, to ensure equality of citizenship, including property rights and freedom of worship.
Christians are also appealing to the international community to recognize the atrocities perpetrated against them as genocide. So far, only the European Union, the U.S., the U.K. and a few countries in Europe have done this.
I have a little bit of information about the Yazidis, just to add to what Abid and Matthew said. I have been speaking with Dalal Abdi. She's the Canadian director of Yazda. She has a wish list, which basically complements what Abid said.
There are apparently at present less than 1,500 Yazidis in Canada, in London, Ontario, where Dalal lives and in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver. She's appealing to Canada to accept more Yazidi refugees, not only because family members are missing, but because it's so critical to the healing of all the trauma that people have been through, especially women. She talked about women who just cannot be healed while they are worrying sick about mothers and sisters still being in ISIS captivity and horrible things happening to them.
She spoke about this blockade on the road from Dohuk to Sinjar. She mentioned that there have been floods lately, and that has really added to the misery of the people who are living in tents and so on. She was asking if Canada could do anything to speed up the process of forming an investigation team so the perpetrators of these atrocities could be brought to justice. I believe that a Canadian, William Wiley, has taken some steps in that regard to set up a team to investigate and bring these perpetrators to justice.
The final thing on the wish list was to support the rebuilding of the infrastructure in Sinjar.
That's all I have to say. Thank you.