6 days ago
Operation Ezra going strong
Ten years have passed since Michel Aziza met with Nafiya Naso, a young woman from Winnipeg's small Yazidi community, and offered to help her raise awareness about the plight of the Yazidi people in Iraq and arrange support for their sponsorship to Canada.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking ethnic minority who follow an ancient monotheistic religion that combines aspects of different faiths. Concentrated primarily in the Sinjar region of Northern Iraq, they have been the victims of persecution by their neighbours for generations. That persecution culminated in August 2014 when ISIS invaded the Sinjar region, displacing, killing, kidnapping and enslaving thousands of Yazidi men, women and children.
Nafiya and her sister Jamileh Naso had arrived in Winnipeg as children when their parents were accepted to Canada as refugees in 1999, long before the events of that terrible summer. But when the sisters learned about the terror being wrought on the Yazidis remaining in Iraq, which included many of their extended family members, they were spurred into action.
That action led Nafiya to her first of many meetings with Aziza and a small group of Jewish community members.
'We ended the meeting by agreeing to help rescue as many refugees as we could by raising funds and also helping Nafiya continue on with her advocacy work and her efforts to raise awareness,' Aziza explains.
That agreement was formalized with the creation of an initiative called Operation Ezra.
'For me personally, it was simply an opportunity to do the right thing and help people who at the time were being persecuted,' Aziza says. 'I had always wondered how and why some people decided to help Jews during the Holocaust while others stood by. This was my opportunity to engage with another community with no other motive than to help.'
Operation Ezra's first order of business was to complete the documentation and raise the funds to privately sponsor Nafiya's uncle, aunt and their six children to Canada.
When that family descended the escalator at Winnipeg's airport in July 2016, Nafiya's father rushed to embrace his brother. They had not seen one another for 26 years!
After making that initial reunion possible, Operation Ezra continued its fundraising and sponsorship efforts, reaching out in the process to other local faith communities for assistance in increasing awareness and financial support, completing sponsorship documentation, and, often after years of waiting, welcoming the newcomers to Winnipeg and helping with their resettlement.
To date, Operation Ezra has privately sponsored 11 Yazidi families, representing 67 people, to Winnipeg, and has applications in process for another 20 people.
'Operation Ezra became one of the largest private rescue efforts for Yazidis in the world,' Jamileh says. 'Jews, Yazidis, Christians, and allies came together to save lives, reunite families, and help survivors rebuild. What began as a local sponsorship effort, quickly grew into a powerful, multi-faith movement rooted in justice, solidarity, and shared humanity.'
That spirit of activism, Jamileh adds, led her to found the Canadian Yazidi Association as 'a survivor-led voice for the missing, the displaced, and the resilient.'
In 2016, the Yazidi association and Operation Ezra successfully lobbied the Canadian government to establish its own rescue operation to bring Yazidis to Canada.
'The intense lobbying at the federal level,' Aziza explains, 'resulted into the sponsorship of approximately 1,200 Yazidis to Canada, 250 of whom came to Winnipeg.'
Those 250 individuals, mostly women and children, were, and continue to be, supported by Operation Ezra in the same way as those who were privately sponsored by the group.
Operation Ezra helped find housing and employment for the new arrivals, enrolled children in school, provided translators, organized adult English classes, ran a kids' soccer league, and developed innovative programs to enable the newcomers' integration and self-sufficiency.
One of these programs is the Healing Farm, where Yazidi volunteers harvest thousands of kilograms of seasonal produce annually that they then distribute among their community and to local food banks.
Most of the Yazidis who arrived in Winnipeg in the last decade have adapted well to Canada. They are working, studying, raising families, and volunteering, and are grateful for the safety and stability of their new home.
For some, however, the terror and trauma of their past endures.
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'I sit with mothers who haven't heard from their daughters in over a decade,' Jamileh says. 'I walk beside youth once held in ISIS captivity, now rediscovering their language and sense of self. I fight for access to culturally competent mental health care … and for justice that has been far too long denied.'
With close to 3,000 Yazidis still considered missing and thousands more living in refugee camps, the work of Operation Ezra and the Canadian Yazidi Association is not done.
'We have a list of thousands of families who regularly reach out, pleading for help,' Nafiya says.
A decade after Operation Ezra was created, Nafiya, Jamileh, Michel and the group's many other volunteers remain determined to rescue, reunite and resettle Yazidi refugees in Winnipeg — a city that has become a sanctuary for a long beleaguered people.
swchisvin@
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