ISIS Murderers Among Us

Geoffrey Clarfield revisits the Yazidi tragedy — and their heinous killers who returned to Canada

Taken from the Summer 2024 edition of  The Dorchester Review, pp. 26-32.

IT IS COMMON knowledge among a growing number of journalists, and a reluctant group of federal officials and spokesmen, that there are yet undisclosed numbers of returned Canadian citizens who left Canada voluntarily to fight with the murderous Islamist Daesh-ISIS in Iraq and Syria during the last decade and especially when ISIS ruled much of those Arab republics between 2014 and 2016. 

It is also common knowledge that during that time Daesh carried out such systematic massacres and enslavement of the indigenous monotheistic Yazidi people who have lived in Kurdistan for centuries and perhaps thousands of years, long before Islam arrived in Iraq, as to qualify as attempted genocide. Yet so far none of Canada’s returning jihadis have been brought to trial, although there are numerous laws on the books that allow the government to do so, the most obvious pertaining to treason.

Let us instead imagine if 250 Canadian passport holders left Canada, in say 1968, and fought with the IRA. Let us say they killed civilians and bombed facilities in Ireland and the United Kingdom, and let us say some of them raped women at gunpoint. We would have heard about it. The British government would have hounded us. The Canadian government would have extradited them and tried them here in Canada. Most would have served long jail sentences.

Those crimes, and more, are what experts suggest roughly 250 Canadian citizens inflicted on innocent non-Muslim minorities in Iraq and Syria less than a decade ago. Yet they have all come home and are as free as you or I.

You can find bits of news about these Canadian-passport-holding volunteers online. But the total number is much harder to find. I got the figure of roughly 250 from the head of a think tank who follows these events closely, whom I consider a trustworthy source, and other researchers have given me similar numbers. The Canadian government on the other hand is not telling us the truth about these men and women, or anything at all if they can help it, and they certainly have not published an exact number.

The reason I suggest that the most obvious charge would be treason is that most of these people were serving with Daesh in Iraq while Canadian personnel were engaged in supporting NATO, coalition partners, and allies in the war against the Islamic State. Today’s Canadian government seems to have forgotten that awkward truth — together with the fact that ISIS had a particular animus against an ancient ethnic group in northern Iraq: the Yazidi. They’re happy to accuse Canada of genocide, falsely, or even Israel. But when a real one is attempted by Canadians they know about, they suddenly lose their voices.

For those not versed in the subject, the Yazidi are Kurdish-speaking monotheists indigenous to the highlands of Kurdistan since at least the Middle Ages and by tradition from time immemorial. In their folklore they say they have suffered 54 onslaughts aimed at wiping them out, of which 2014 was not just the latest but also the most devastating. 

In the summer of 2014, the autonomous, well-armed and well-organized political and military entity seeking to conquer Iraq and neighbouring areas, and calling itself ISIS or ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq or Islamic State in the Levant), “Daesh” in Arabic, invaded the ancient homeland of the Yazidi. The odious response of the largely Arab national forces of the recently formed post-Saddam Iraqi government, as well as that of the local Kurdish militias of northern Iraq, was to withdraw all their armies — typically a few short hours before Daesh militants invaded the Yazidi heartland in and around Mount Shingal (Sinjar in Arabic). 

As for the U.S. and their allies, officially they had withdrawn the bulk of their forces from Iraq by 2011. But they were still there in significant numbers and militarily active when Daesh invaded and conquered northern Iraq. Yet no Western force or entity in Iraq even implemented the simple idea of airlifting arms to the abandoned Yazidi, despite knowing full well that many Yazidi men had served in the Peshmerga, that they were mounting an initial defence of their homeland (in the vain hope that Kurdish reinforcements would arrive), and that they were able to bear arms. 

Only later, after ISIS had displaced the Yazidi, did U.S. government forces airdrop packets of food and water to dying Yazidi refugees who had fled to the heights of Mount Shingal. Some readers may have seen the heartbreaking footage.

There is no doubt what happened, or why. The Daesh fighters were mostly men in their mid-20s. They were relatively disciplined and well organized, and systematically cruel and brutal. And their publicly stated goal was the conquest of the Yazidi “devil worshippers” (heretics according to Islam) as part of their plan to conquer first the Near East, then the rest of the Islamic world, and finally the West. 

We must remember that ISIS was and is an organization defined by Jihad or Holy War as are its allies like Hamas — who buy into an ideology of world conquest. And they sought a final solution for the Yazidi nation who they saw and still see as outright pagans who cannot be tolerated.

IN THE END, ISIS fighters were defeated by western-led Coalition forces and newly trained Iraqi national forces. But by then ISIS Jihadis had slaughtered up to 30,000 Yazidi men, had enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and sent hundreds if not thousands of Yazidi boys to terrorist training camps so they could then be forced to fight with ISIS forces. Afterwards, many local Arab and Kurdish neighbours of the displaced Yazidi took over their homes and farms. Thousands of these Yazidi women enslaved by ISIS are still missing. 

The tragic fate of the Yazidi was not solely due to ISIS. Their other neighbours, including some associated with the West, acted with premeditated malice. 

Towards the summer of 2014 most Yazidi villagers got a feeling that something was not right. They heard rumors of an imminent attack. 

They had been assured by the leaders of the Kurdish Regional Government that the Peshmerga, their armed Kurdish militia, was strong and organized and would repel any attack by a radical Islamic group that threatened their territory and the people who lived there, including the Yazidi and nearby Christian minorities such as the Assyrians or Chaldeans, some of the world’s oldest Christian communities. But as the day of the coordinated attack by ISIS on Yazidi villages approached, the Peshmerga and the regional authorities instead did everything in their power to make sure that no Yazidi men who had police or military experience and who kept arms would be allowed to do so. 

They assured the Yazidi men that the Peshmerga would do the fighting. And when some Yazidi tried to leave their homesteads, which they felt would be targets of ISIS, they were prevented from doing so by Kurdish forces. Then suddenly the Kurdish forces and their authorities would disappear, either in the middle of the night or in broad daylight, clogging the roads with their vehicles and making it nearly impossible for Yazidi civilians and their families to follow suit. 

They certainly did not leave any arms behind even though they knew the remaining Yazidi were about to be attacked. During the next hours and up to a day or two in some instances, Yazidi families heard the gunfire of approaching ISIS forces who also had advanced artillery, mortars, and rockets and they had to decide whether to flee or stay. 

WHEN A GROUP of ISIS fighters would enter a Yazidi village the first thing they did was randomly kill people, instilling fear and terror. Once they had taken control of the village, they would separate the men from the women. The men would be herded off at gunpoint and invited to convert to Islam. Most of the men did not take up the offer which triggered immediate mass shootings of Yazidi men whose mass graves are being excavated.

Then the women would be taken to holding areas such as a local school compound. There some of them would be immediately raped and beaten. Others would remain with their children and soon frontline ISIS fighters would confiscate their jewelry and personal belongings. As most traditional women in the Middle East carry their life savings in the gold and silver jewelry that they wear and carry, it was the first line of systematic looting.

Children over twelve were then separated from their mothers and boys were sent to Jihadi training camps to serve as cannon fodder. 

Then, after confiscating cellular phones all surviving Yazidi would be registered. Women, with or without their children, would be bussed deep into the Iraqi and Syrian heartland of the Islamic state (often without food or water on the way) while others would be distributed to ISIS fighters as “wives” or concubines or simply domestic slaves.

When ISIS was eventually defeated in northern Iraq, Yazidi women were dragged along as a kind of slave harem by their ISIS masters to UNHCR run refugee camps. Only a few brave young Yazidi have told the camp administrators that they are non-Muslims. Many of them still linger in these camps to this day.

A reader who is otherwise unfamiliar with the slaughter of the Yazidi and the rise of Daesh may sadly conclude that this conduct is the ever-recurring pattern of war, conquest, and enslavement. Including the ideological justification that the victims were inferior and had brought it on themselves. And as far as the history of war and conquest goes, it is all true. 

However, in this case we must also remember that the behavior of Daesh terrorists was sanctioned at the highest level of the “Islamic State” by its religious experts who provided spiritual guidance to their holy warriors in real time on the ground. 

A few months before ISIS terrorists attacked, their religious scholars, called the “Research and Fatwa Department of the Islamic State,” were busy formulating their Shariah-inspired precepts on how to treat Yazidi slaves. 

Here are some significant excerpts:

No. 68, January 31, 2015

They even added an unmistakable and concise religious justification for contemporary slavery or what we would call “female human trafficking.”

It is permissible to buy, sell, or give as a gift female captives and slaves, for they are merely property which can be disposed of [if that does not cause the Muslim Ummah] any harm or damage.

A memory which I cannot get rid of is the story of a horrified Yazidi female slave who noticed that her captor prayed each night just before forced sexual encounter (rape) for he felt that by doing so he was doing a good deed. I have interviewed a young Yazidi woman from Syria on the phone who still experiences much pain from having experienced the same kind of thing.

Most of the personal memoirs mirror the above pattern. Some Yazidi men survived conversion and slavery. Most did not and it is estimated that over 30,000 male Yazidi were murdered. Some women survived rape and enslavement. So far maybe 3,000 out of a total of 7,000, even more. Many escaped after the defeat and retreat of a rump ISIS into the wilds of eastern Syria in 2018. 

Many have been ransomed by Yazidi families through intermediaries in touch with ISIS slave owners who wanted to also profit financially. An average ransom can run up to $15,000 U.S. dollars. Three thousand Yazidi women are still missing, and some may be in “refugee” camps, still slaves of their captors who still threaten their lives. But there is a deeper historical meaning to what has and is happening to the Yazidi.

HERE WE MUST remember that Daesh attracted volunteers from over 60 nations. They were not just locals, Iraqis and neighbouring Kurds and Arabs. It was an international Islamist project in which 60,000 men and women from around the world joined ISIS and yes, some were Canadians.

Father Patrick Desbois and Costel Nastasie are co-authors of The Terrorist Factory: ISIS, the Yazidi Genocide, and Exporting Terror (Arcade, 2018). It is no surprise that one of those authors, Father Desbois, is among the world’s expert researchers on what has come to be called the “Holocaust by bullets,” the name of a 2009 book he published about the murder of more than one million eastern European Jews by special Nazi and collaborating units called Einsatzgruppen. They were not part of the Waffen-SS (the military wing) but the political wing known as Allgemeine-SS.

The death camps and their use of poison gas were the most devastating and infamous instruments of the Shoah. But the Einsatzgruppen and their local eastern European collaborators, especially in the Ukraine where a different kind of war is now raging, would round up masses of Jews, have them dig their own graves, line them up, then shoot them into those death pits and they too claimed a vast number of victims. 

There’s a Canadian angle here too: the Ukrainian Canadian veteran who was recently honoured in our Parliament was a member of the 14 Waffen-SS “Galicia” Division, a collaborationist military unit. What he did we will never know. But he did fight for the Germans in the Ukraine. That is a fact. (See this edition, p. 23.)

FOR SOME YEARS, Desbois interviewed non-Jewish witnesses, often in their nineties, so that these mass graves in the Ukraine can be preserved and commemorated, for if not, they will be turned into unmarked suburbs and parking lots. And now he and Costel Nastasie are doing similar work with and for the Yazidis of Iraq and Syria, in the refugee and IDP (internally displaced person) camps. 

Desbois and Nastasie’s argument is simple: that ISIL-Daesh-ISIS has been behaving like the Nazis and the SS. And there are at least six important parallels. 

The Nazis and the SS had a Master Race ideology. ISIL-Daesh has a similar ideology, though with a religious basis rather than a racial one, that supports their notion of innate superiority, based on their interpretation of Islam. Their theologians and scholars have ruled that the indigenous monotheists of Iraq and Syria, the Yazidi, are marked for Holy War, in Arabic, Jihad. This means that when ISIL terrorists surround and overwhelm a Yazidi village, if the villagers do not instantly convert to Islam, as they do not, they then kill off the men, take the young boys to Jihadi training camps, kill the elderly women, rape, and enslave the girls and younger women. 

ISIS has conducted mass murder as did the Einsatzgruppen. For this to be efficient they must have local non-Yazidi Muslim neighbours colluding with them, as the graves are usually prepared in advance of an attack on a Yazidi village. Desbois and Nastasie point out that there is never genocide without the active participation of neighbours, who cooperate with the incoming and conquering tyrants as did so many (un-)Christian Europeans with the Nazis against their Jewish neighbours.

Like the Nazis, ISIL were committed to documenting their actions and did so thoroughly. They even had a well-worked-out media strategy and dramatically stage-managed the deaths of so many of their victims, as when one Yazidi captive woman reported that her ISIL “husband” had directed the live burning of a captured Jordanian pilot. 

Like the Nazis, ISIL created a series of secret prisons where they brutally tortured Yazidi and anyone else they thought may be heretical, then had them summarily executed.

There’s also an appalling medical parallel. Much of the German medical profession colluded with the Nazis and recent research has suggested that the Nazis were also avid hallucinogenic drug users and often gave them to their fighting troops. Likewise ISIL gave drugs to its suicide bombers, drugged captive Yazidi children who they then threatened with death if they did not become terrorists and suicide bombers and also ensured that their captive women were drugged so they would not escape. As for the complicity of medical authorities, there is one chilling example in the book about a wealthy Saudi fighter who purchased a Yazidi slave woman. She resisted his “advances” so he had her taken to the hospital in Raqqa, Syria, sedated, tested for virginity and then he raped her. He had a wife back in Saudi Arabia. Hundreds of Syrian and Iraqi medical personnel and hospitals under ISIL authority had no problem drugging and giving virginity tests to Yazidi women slaves. 

Finally, ISIL was and is an international movement like Nazism, often drawing from similar populations. In the Caucasus during the Second World War thousands of Armenians, Georgians, and Azerbaijanis and in the Balkans, Muslim Bosnians and Albanians, joined the Nazis, embraced what they understood of the ideology (e.g. its anti-Semitism), and conducted atrocities in various theatres of the war, often far from their homelands in the Caucasus. The countries who have allowed their citizens to join ISIL include Arab League nations like Iraq and Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. But most horrible of all is that Western including NATO nations have let citizens leave and join ISIL such as Germany, France, Norway, Belgium, Britain, Australia, and Canada. All these countries have embassies in Ottawa.

All these countries have robust secret services, too, that seem to have been passive or asleep at the wheel during the slaughter of the Yazidi, and now that ISIL has lost most of its territory, none of these terrorists are being sought out and prosecuted. The Canadian government has actually publicly announced that those Jihadi fighters who return here from the Middle East will not be prosecuted. Instead, they are getting “therapy.” Others call for their “reintegration into Canadian society” which means a get out of jail free card.

If you go to the Canadian Forces website you will see that they are still operating in Iraq. Canadians are training the Iraqi army, but they certainly see action now and then. What they have not been tasked to do is to protect the Yazidi.

FROM MY CONTACTS in the Yazidi community in Canada and Iraq I am sure that Canadian and coalition troops have still made no effort to protect the Yazidi in their homeland where ISIL fighters are now returning and there is no hope that they will do so soon. I do not blame the soldiers, but I do blame their military and political masters.

One could argue that ISIL simply lives up to its ideology and as good 21^st-century multiculturalists we should not judge them. According to our traditional ideas they may be evil, but their conduct is consistent with their radical Jihadi values. But to turn a blind eye requires that we not condemn murder, torture and rape, including ISIL brothels. 

Even they do seem to be ashamed of it in part. Desbois and Nastasie write:

If the men of ISIS are so proud of the rapes of Yazidi girls and women, why don’t they commit them in front of the cameras? Decapitation and crucifixion ordered by an Islamic judge are awarded places of honor so why don’t they show these young women locked up in basements tied to their beds in pain? Why don’t they show off the black canvas bags filled with telephones, jewelry, and money they load in their cars when they arrest Yazidis if those abuses are for the glory of the religious ideology they claim to uphold and defend?”

Those who have read their modern history must conclude that the Holocaust by bullets was a technical success, claiming a million victims. And it has now been imitated in Iraq and Syria. Yet some of the perpetrators and facilitators of this latest version, conducted by Daesh-ISIS-ISIL, now live among us. What a moral catastrophe! 

Today Canada is still legally at war in Iraq and Syria. It was at war in Iraq when the Yazidi were slaughtered in 2014. Canadian citizens participated in this genocide and now they live among us, free as birds. Let us not forget that there are now more than 2,000 new Canadian citizens who are Yazidi. Do they not deserve justice? Do not all humans deserve human rights?

Finally, where are the Canadian lawyers, judges and activists calling for the investigation and trial of up to 250 Canadian citizens who “fought” for ISIS? Why are poorly educated, indoctrinated Canadian students protesting imaginary Israeli misdeeds instead of expressing outrage at these real ones perpetrated by fellow Canadians? And especially where are those storied self-anointed Canadian feminists and their global concerns? 

The answer is, “Missing in action.” Along with the politicians, and the prosecutions for treason. 

Geoffrey Clarfield is that rarest of phenomena, a conservative Canadian anthropologist.