No easy answers on ISIS religious persecution, MPs learn

As CBC News reports the Canadian government mayrefocusits Syrian refugee effort onnon-Muslim religious minorities, a House committee has beengetting a crash course on just how complex that can be.

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For the last three weeks, the foreign affairs committee has been studying Canada's response to the "violence, religious persecution and dislocation" caused by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) throughout the Middle East, with particular emphasis onthe situation in Iraq.

So far, though,it's fair to say the committee seems to beespeciallyinterested in theimplications ofthe ongoing conflict forreligious minorities particularly, though not exclusively,Christians.

Among the witness groups invited to testify thus far:

• Catholic Near East Welfare Association
• Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Toronto (Canada)
• Chaldean Catholic Church (Canada)
• Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East
• Georgetown University's Religious Freedom Project

Debate over sponsoring Muslim families

Earlier this month, the committee heard from Rabeas Allos, an Iraqi-Canadian who has spent the last few years helping Iraqi Christians settle in Canada through a program run bythe Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto.

He told MPs that he's seen people in churches "arguing about whether we should be sponsoring Muslim families."

"In one church in the Toronto area, for example, they sponsored a family," he noted.

"It turned out to be Muslim and people went berserk when they found out and they are decent, good people."

Allos said representatives from his community have met with Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander"regarding Christians, basically," as well as Yazidis.

"They're open for suggestions, especially if it's not going to cost the taxpayers money," he told the committee.

"So we'll be having further meetings with the staff at Immigration Canada."

'We do not want to leave our land'

Hundreds of thousands of Yazidi have been forced from theSinjar region by ISIS forces, and are currently scatterd across Kurdistan territory.

But astheir faith is inextricably linked to their homelands, most have no desire to be relocated to Canada, or anywhere else according to Iraqi parliamentarianVian Saeed, who testified before the committee on December 2.

• Read the transcript from December 2 meeting here

"We do not want to leave our land here where I was born, where my father was born, and where my grandfather was born," she told MPs.

"We want to stay here to live in our land peacefully again. I'm so proud to be Kurd and I'm so proud to be Yazidi, and I want to stay in my country."

Yazidis get less support?

Yazidi human rights advocate Khalid Haider, who appeared at the same meeting, suggested that Yazidi refugees are also unable to avail themselves of the humanitarian support offered to displaced Iraqi Christians.

"In the Kurdistan region there are some minorities like the Christians," he noted.

"The Catholic Church will provide them with a lot of aid. They have a backup, but in the Yazidi case, nobody is going to back us up unless countries like Canada, or the United States, or the United Nations in general send us some aid if that aid gets through."

In response to a question from Conservative MP Costas Menegakis, who also serves as parliamentary secretaryfor multiculturalism, Chaldean Catholic Church representative Reverend Niaz Toma said thathis organization has no reports of Iraqi Christians currently "under the control" of ISIS.

• Read the transcript from the November 27 meeting here

The treatment meted out to the Yazidis, he explained,was far more brutal.

"The way they treated the Yazidis was quite different from the way they treated Christians," he told the committee on November 27.

"Apparently the instructions were to just take the Christians out of their towns, their villages, their cities, their houses, confiscate everything even heart medication was confiscated from an elderly person and kick them out. The instructions with regard to the [Yazidis] were to torture them kill them savagely."

The group wasasked about the reason for the different treatment, Tomassaid.

"The answer was that in the Koran, the book they believe was dictated by God to Muhammad, Christians are described as 'The People of the Book' and there is a verse in there that says to treat them well So they are literally going by the Koran."

The Yazidis, however,"are, for them, blasphemers they don't believe in God."

Thatstudy is expected to resume when MPs return to the Hill in the new year, with four additional meetings scheduled.