Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time today with the member for Mississauga—Streetsville. It is an honour to rise in the House today to speak on the troubling situation in Iraq. I want to thank you, Mr. Speaker, for granting the request for an emergency debate on this serious situation and to discuss the government's ongoing response.
The spread of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, has been accompanied by heinous acts of brutality against Iraq's religious minority communities. In August, we witnessed the harrowing scenes of tens of thousands of Yazidis stranded in the Sinjar mountains, men, women and children who fled en masse under the threat of torture, enslavement and death at the hands of ISIL.
The persecution of Iraq's Christian communities has been no less brutal. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians have now fled their homes, having been faced with the stark choice of the advancing Islamist militants: submit to Islam, flee, or be killed.
By some estimates, we are now witnessing the near total disappearance of Christians from the region. Whereas the population included more than one million Christians prior to 2003, including over 600,000 in Baghdad and tens of thousands more in Mosul and in Kirkuk as of late July, these numbers are estimated to have dwindled to less than 400,000 with many more having now fled Iraq as the violence has accelerated over the past six weeks. The incredible loss that this represents for Iraq, for the region and for the world cannot be overstated.
The 2,000-year-old Iraqi Christian community was founded by the immediate successors to the Apostles. It has made substantial contributions to the economic, intellectual and cultural heritage of the Middle East. However, most crucially, the pluralism fostered by the existence of these communities alongside their Muslim neighbours is a crucial ingredient in fostering the tolerance, respect and pluralism that Iraq must embrace for it to achieve everlasting stability. Without a stable presence of Christians and religious minorities in Iraq, the chances of building a democratic country grounded in respect for the rule of law is greatly diminished.
We recognize that the perpetrators of these acts of violence are adherents to a twisted religious ideology motivated by a belief in a divine call to war against the enemies of Islam. This is a spreading cancer. The hateful ideology that motivates ISIL is also fuelling violence in East Africa, in Nigeria, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and throughout the Middle East. While the government has rightly directed the Canadian military to support our friends and allies in stopping ISIL's advance on the ground, military force alone cannot root out the long-term threat posed by Islamic extremism.
For this reason, the government is also focused on advancing the cause of religious freedom in Iraq as part of our overarching response to the crisis. This means that beyond our short-term efforts to protect religious communities that have fled the violence, we recognize that a stable Iraqi government, grounded first in religious tolerance and ultimately in religious freedom, is the only reliable way out of this spiral of violence, persecution and death being fostered by the extremist views of the Islamists.
The majority of Muslims in Iraq and throughout the world deplore the false interpretation of Islam in whose name the violence is being perpetrated. However, they must also recognize that the extremism flourishes in an environment without respect and tolerance for religious diversity and religious difference. Legal and social restrictions on religious freedom, including the prohibitions against blasphemy and apostasy that we have seen elsewhere in Muslim majority countries, cannot be allowed to take hold in Iraq; not just because they infringe on the rights of Christians and other minorities to practise their faiths, but because they discourage the liberalizing voices within Islam that are crucial to countering the influences of the extremists in the long term.
This is precisely why the government has committed to advancing freedom of religion as a central component of our response to the situation in Iraq.
Through the Office of Religious Freedom, we will be working over the medium- and long-term to promote interfaith dialogue, to encourage understanding and respect between Iraq's religious communities, and to help build a political and social framework that allows all Iraqis to express their faith freely and without fear. To that end, over the next two to three months, the Office of Religious Freedom is working to identify, in collaboration with implementing partner organizations, a number of initiatives to assist in these efforts. We will also be reaching out to friends and allies to build recognition of the important role religious freedom will play in ensuring long-term, sustainable peace in Iraq and the ultimate defeat of Islamist-fuelled violence.
Our ambassador for religious freedom, Dr. Andrew Bennett, is also conducting outreach with the Canadian-Iraqi religious community, including members of the Syriac and Chaldo-Assyrian churches, the Yazidis, representatives from the Jewish community, and Shia and Sunni Muslim community leaders, to identify how best to help Iraq's threatened religious communities and support longer term tolerance and freedom. Ambassador Bennett has also held a fruitful discussion with a number of faith-based aid organizations, such as the Catholic Near East Welfare Association and Aid to the Church in Need, to explore opportunities for a partnership with Canada on the ground. As a multicultural and multi-faith society, Canada is uniquely called to promote the peaceful coexistence of Iraq's various religious and ethnic communities. We have a rich and proud tradition of diversity, respect and tolerance, a tradition that has yielded peace and prosperity for our people. Through our engagement in Iraq, we will honour this tradition by acting against hate and persecution, by championing the values of pluralism and religious freedom, and supporting Iraqis as they work to build a more stable future.
As the member of Parliament for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, which includes CFB Petawawa, I am proud to acknowledge the Canadian Special Operations Regiment, CSOR, which is headquartered in Petawawa. CSOR was established in 2006 and is the first new Canadian regiment to be stood up since 1968 when the Canadian Airborne Regiment was created. On that note, the politically motivated decision to disband the airborne regiment was wrong. In today's troubled world, I know that Canadians would benefit from those skills.
As Canadians are aware, CSOR members have been deployed to Iraq to advise and provide intelligence first-hand to the Canadian government about the situation in Iraq and the threat posed by ISIL. On behalf of the Canadian government, I wish to thank the Petawawa families of serving soldiers for the important role they play in keeping the home fires burning.