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Nada and her children were forced to watch four men being beheaded

At one gruesome point, Nada told me through an interpreter during our hour-long interview at an educational meeting on the Yazidi situation this past Sunday, Nada and her children were forced to watch four men being beheaded. Eventually, because Nada speaks fluent Arabic and could pass as Muslim, she was able to escape with her children and contact family members in Kurdistan, who paid for smugglers to take them there.

Canada accepted Nada and her children, but not her father or sister. She has been living in London, Ont., for eight months. Recently, on a bus, she recognized X — the slave-market boss who had owned her and used her for months. They got off at the same stop. X saw her, covered his face and ran off.

They got off at the same stop. X saw her, covered his face and ran off

Nada went to the refugee centre and told them the man’s real name and his ISIL name. The official there responded that she was too traumatized to be sure of what she saw. And then that person reportedly told her, “Don’t tell anyone.”

But Nada, who doesn’t need to be submissive any more, told me. I will be happy to share this man’s identity with any immigration official who asks for it. Maybe he’s the only ISIL member who slipped through Canada’s vetting net, or maybe he’s one of a hundred. Nada doesn’t care, nor (at the moment) do I. She does not want to spend her life in Canada terrified she will cross his path again, nor should she have to.

Photo by Hadi Mizban/AP

In June, 2016, a United Nations report declared that the slaughter, sexual slavery and rounding up of Yazidis to “erase their identity” met the 1948 Convention on Genocide’s criteria for genocide. In October of 2016, Canadian MPs unanimously supported a motion by Conservative MP and immigration critic Michelle Rempel to bring in an unspecified number of Yazidi women and girls within 120 days. Following “much study,” our government agreed to bring more than a thousand “victims of ISIL,” including Yazidis, by the end of 2017.