Sure. Before I do so, though, Mr. Chairman, if you'll indulge me I'd like to note that this may well be Mr. Norlock's last parliamentary intervention after nine years of public service here and many years before that with the Ontario police. I'd like to thank him for his service as a passionate advocate for the people of the Canadian Armed Forces in representing our air force wing at Trenton. Thank you, sir, for being a great partner for the military.
You're quite right. I think there is a humanitarian imperative for our Operation Impact in Iraq and Syria. Let's go back to last August when people were seeing Yazidis on television screens, this ancient sort of gnostic religious community who have faced waves of persecution. There are still a couple of hundred thousand of them left, and they were fleeing their ancient homes and villages in the Nineveh plains to go up to the centre of their ancient homeland in Mount Sinjar. They were literally being hunted down by Daesh, by ISIL terrorists. As soon as ISIL could grab a Yazidi woman or girl, as young as the age of eight, they were sold into sexual slavery and human trafficking operations, which is absolutely odious. There have been confirmed reports of their selling these women on a market to other places in the Middle East. Some girls as young as eight were raped multiple times a day and treated as property of war games by the ISIL or the Daesh terrorists.
Think of the Assyrian people. They're the indigenous people of the Nineveh plains of Mesopotamia. They're been around there for thousands of years, speaking Aramaic and have been Christians for 1,700 years, long before Arabic or Islam showed up in Mesopotamia. They were also being hunted down. I think I mentioned in a speech in the House that I had spoken to the leader of the Chaldean Christian church of the Assyrians who told me about how in Mosul, Daesh went into the hospitals and approached the elderly, infirm, and handicapped Assyrian Christians who could not leave and threatened them with being beheaded in their hospital beds if they did not convert to Islam on the spot.
This is what we are talking about. These are the kinds of depredations that we have. I don't think we've seen evil like this so raw since the death camps of the SS in the Nazi regime. I hope people understand that there is a profound moral obligation for us to be there, as well as a security one.