Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you. I wanted to say that the Hazara community has lost about 62% or more of its population. They have faced decades of perpetual widespread and systematic discrimination. That is what and how the whole century of the history of the Hazara has been. I believe this committee has the power and the tools to at least recognize what the Hazara have gone through and the challenges they are facing.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  As Mr. Stanton has rightly said, Canada is an important country. It's a powerful country, and it plays a crucial role in recognizing the atrocities that the Hazaras have faced and still face in Afghanistan, particularly in viewing that those who massacred Hazaras—if not all of them, most of them—are still in power, right in the Taliban.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you. Thank you for these questions. Unfortunately, the situation to get information out of Afghanistan is very difficult, particularly from rural areas and from many others where the Hazaras are living. It is near to impossible to hear about or to collect and verify information on the atrocities that are happening in those areas.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the invitation to appear before this committee. I would like to start by noting how timely your study is. For more than a century, the Hazaras have been facing continual and systematic discrimination in their own homeland of Afghanistan. Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Amnesty International has documented several massacres of civilian Hazaras or Shia Hazaras in the Ghazni, Daykundi and Ghor provinces of Afghanistan.