Iraq News

Canada parliament votes to take in Yazidi refugees

Canada's parliament on Tuesday (October 25th) adopted a motion to resettle Yazidi refugees within four months, while declaring the group's persecution by the "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL) a genocide, AFP reported.

Iraqi activist Nadia Murad, a Yazidi who survived abduction and rape at the hands of ISIL , was on hand for the unanimous vote in the House of Commons.

The government said it is still sorting out a plan for the airlift and does not yet know how many Yazidi refugees Canada will take in over the 120-day period.

Immigration Minister John McCallum offered a reminder that Canada had managed to resettle more than 25,000 Syrian refugees in just a few months at the start of the year.

Murad, 23, was taken by ISIL from her village of Kocho near Iraq's northern town of Sinjar in August 2014 and brought to the city of Mosul. She was tortured and raped for three months until she managed to escape and flee to Germany.

Since then, she has become a human rights activist, bringing the plight of the Yazidi community, especially the forced sexual enslavement and human trafficking of women and children captured by ISIL to international attention.

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