The Wrath of ISIS and the Case for the Yazidi

Given the tumultuous experience that the United States, Israel and the West have been having with Iran, it is easy to lose sight of tragic moral obligations. Let me briefly outline the plight of the Yazidis and say that I have just finished authoring a book about their cause which I plan to publish soon and which will plead their case in depth.

On September 22, 2023, all the elected members of the Parliament of Canada, Liberal, New Democratic Party and Conservative rose to their feet to give a standing ovation to a 98-year-old man seated in the visitors’ gallery.

The honored guest, Ukrainian-born Canadian citizen Yaroslav Hunka, was described by one parliamentarian as “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero …a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran who for Ukrainian independence against the Russians.”

It turns out that during World War II, Hunka had served in a unit of soldiers under Nazi authority and organized by no less a historical figure than Heinrich Himmler, the founder of the Nazi SS. These units’ main goal was the murder of more than one million innocent, defenseless Jewish men women and children by firing squad. Those who conducted these atrocities were never tried and punished. Scholars of the Holocaust call this the “Holocaust by bullets.”

As recently as eight years ago, experts believe that more than 250 Canadian citizens went to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS in a similar “Holocaust by bullets” venture, this time against an innocent and defenseless religious minority, the Yazidi. These same Canadians have returned to our shores and join men like Hunka who are literally “the murderers among us.” This should not go unchallenged.

Why should we support the Yazidi? There are many reasons. One is humanitarian, as the Yazidi are a persecuted ethnic group of Indigenous Kurdish monotheists who were decimated by ISIS. But there are others, as the Yazidi have also functioned as dependable allies in war with the USA.

The most pressing reason is that the US, its allies, and Canada have made war in their backyard, and they have paid the price for it. When advanced industrial states like the United States and its more than sixty national allies of its Coalition of the Willing (which later included Canada) invaded Iraq or a second time in two decades there was much “collateral damage.” The Coalition to this day has not taken any responsibility for this damage which led to the slaughter of the Yazidi by unopposed ISIS forces.

During 2003 and 2004, the ostensible allied goal was the final defeat of a horrid Arab dictator, Saddam Hussein, who had the blood of his own citizens on his hands and who was a threat to regional and international stability. In addition to his internal terror and earlier war with Iran (that killed about a million people on both sides), Saddam had waged chemical warfare against his own Iraqi Kurdish citizens and, during the early nineties, had brutally tried to conquer Kuwait.

After the successful conclusion of this second Gulf War, the Americans found themselves in the position of undisputed rulers of Iraq. In northern Iraq, Kurdistan, they were assisted by hundreds of Yazidi translators, without whose local knowledge, help and assistance would have made the liberation of Kurdistan horrifically bloody and unsuccessful. We call these kinds of people allies.

The Americans and their partners, after finally defeating the forces of Saddam Hussein, eventually finding and hanging him, did not have a game plan for the reconstruction of Iraq. Billions of dollars were spent and wasted on this initiative which officially ended in 2011.

This river of U.S. taxpayer money fueled enormous corruption in both Iraq and the United States – as the military, as well as civilian and defense contractors competed for this almost endless largesse. As the “occupiers” could not establish a national authority (a recent example of failed Western “nation building”) religious and ethnic factions began fighting each other and the American forces.

It was not that the Americans lacked the resources, military bravery, or the willpower to reconstruct Iraq and leave behind a modernizing democracy, but that Iraq itself is a century-old fiction created by the British after WWI. It comprises three to five distinct peoples and regions whose people have been at odds with each other for centuries. The British tried to remedy this by importing a Bedouin “king” from the Hashemi tribe in the Arabian Hejaz and created the “Kingdom of Iraq.” It did not last because Iraq is a fictitious entity.

The Americans and Coalition of the Willing have never learned this basic lesson that Iraq is three to five “countries” that have fought constantly over the centuries.

And so, the American “occupation” (really its liberation and pacification) of Iraq amplified these historic “internal” conflicts as neighboring countries like Iran, Turkey and Syria began to intervene on various sides creating their own Iraqi clients. Inevitably in situations like this the “big players” beat up upon, or neglect to defend, the little players, and so in 2014 the big players, including the US and all its intelligence services, watched passively as the Islamic State invaded and occupied the Yazidi heartland.

It is estimated that in 2014 the Islamic state massacred up to 30,000 Yazidi men, enslaved up to 7,000 Yazidi women, took scores of children to “Jihadi” training camps, torturing, raping, and murdering as they went. They then went on to despoil the Yazidi nation of most of its property, possessions, and livelihoods. Half of the Yazidi now live in camps for IDPs, internally displaced people, throughout Iraq.

The Iraqi authorities have done little to compensate them or to help them resettle their farms and houses, most of which have been occupied by former Muslim Arab and Kurdish neighbors. The allies, long gone, have done nothing.

The persecution of the Yazidi by ISIS is a continuation of centuries of Jihad “neighboring” Kurdish and Arab Muslim tribes attacking and despoiling the Yazidi. This preindustrial pattern has been revived and bureaucratized by contemporary radical Islamic movements such as Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, and ISIS in what continues to be a multinational alphabet soup of Jihadis with computers and cell phones.

What was different during this latest persecution of the Yazidi was and remains the modern bureaucratic planning behind it, the coordination of national and regional powers and the possible and likely American collusion in the near destruction of this ancient indigenous nation, whose existence seems to “get in the way” of powerful Western political lobbies and multinational oil companies.

Note that the manner and style of this latest Yazidi slaughter seems to be modeled on the slaughter of the Jews of Ukraine by Nazis and by local volunteers during the early years of WWII. Add to that the issue of sexual slavery and the fact that the perpetrators are roaming freely in Canada and Europe.

So that the reader does not see the Yazidi solely as “just another group of victims,” I must point out that they have a national history, a unique social organization, and religion demonstrating that they comprise an indigenous state, according to the measures of reasonable historians of the Middle East and less importantly according to the UN guidelines for Indigenous Peoples.

Canada and the US must, given the fictional and fragmentary nature of Iraq, support the creation of an independent Kurdistan, but one that must make amends for its desertion of its Yazidi minority in the face of attack by ISIS.

In Canada, during the war against Assad in Syria, the federal government brought in 40,000 unvetted individuals from this region – and many of them must have fought for or supported ISIS in many ways.

What is particularly appalling is that the Canadian government publicly admits that it has allowed back Canadian citizens who fought for ISIS and who no doubt killed and enslaved innocent Yazidi. Now they are free to resume their “pre-Jihad” lives. Experts suggest at least two to three hundred ISIS veterans have been allowed “home.” The number may be much higher because there are no official statistics.

None of these probable war criminals have been investigated, taken to court, or prosecuted.

Canada once let in Nazis and SS members after WWII who were posing as “refugees and displaced persons.” Now it has, once again, invited “the murderers among us” to return to its shores.

This should not stand.