Juno News - February 28, 2019


Yazidi refugees are being threatened by their former captors...in Canada

Topics
threatening calls from ISIS survivors
Guests
Majid El-Shafi
Mentioned
Yazidi Majed El Shafie Yazidis Barbara Kay
True North Report： Canadians are over Trudeau. Are you？ Jody Wilson-Raybould exposes Trudeau in bombshell testimony

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

168.63

Word count

1,863

Sentence count

104

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A report on CTV suggests that former ISIS sex slaves in Canada have now received harassing and threatening phone calls from people claiming to be their captors. For another True North Talk, I'm joined by Majid El Shafi, from One Free World International, to discuss the disturbing trend.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 There was a story told a few years back in the National Post by Barbara Kay involving a
00:00:05.300 young Yazidi woman, someone who fled to Canada for safety, who said that she found on a city bus
00:00:12.580 and was able to see the man who held her captive overseas. And this was quite a chilling story for
00:00:18.920 a lot of people, but now we have one that makes that look significantly as part of a pattern here.
00:00:24.920 And it was a report on CTV that said several Yazidi women, former ISIS sex slaves in Canada,
00:00:31.080 have now been received harassing and threatening phone calls from people claiming to be their
00:00:35.680 captors. For another True North Talk, I'm very pleased to be joined by Reverend Majid El-Shafi
00:00:40.960 from One Free World International. Reverend, thanks very much for your time today.
00:00:45.940 Pleasure being here with you.
00:00:47.440 Now, I know that One Free World International has done a lot of work with the resettlement efforts
00:00:52.300 for a lot of people that have come from this region anyway. But tell me what it is that's
00:00:57.300 really happened here. Because when I read that initial CTV report, I mean, this is not something
00:01:01.820 that I could even imagine, but here it is in Canada.
00:01:06.800 Well, let's just introduce what the Yazidi victims or survivors are. They are sex-slaved by ISIS. 0.72
00:01:14.880 They took over this part of Iraq. They enslaved more than 7,000 Yazidi girls. I met with some of the 0.92
00:01:25.680 survivors, and we was able to help many of them as much as 600-plus, some of them as young as nine
00:01:33.600 years old, and they used to rape her more than 20 times a day. So through our work and our effort,
00:01:41.520 who was able to advocate on their behalf with the Canadian government, that's when the Canadian
00:01:47.140 government agreed on bringing around 1,200 family of them here to Canada. So these survivors
00:01:54.360 are suffering a lot from trauma, from the torture, from the persecution, from the rape that they faced.
00:02:01.280 So when they came here to Canada, they assumed the safety and the security. Obviously, the Canadian
00:02:08.760 government really failed. It's a field of leadership with their health, with their mental health issues,
00:02:17.240 with the services that they provided. And it was up to organizations like One Free World International
00:02:22.860 and others to be able to step in and to try to help them and to protect them.
00:02:27.920 Now, in the midst of all of this, in the middle of all of this healing, when you come here to Canada,
00:02:32.880 they start to receive calls and emails and threatening calls from some of the ISIS fighters
00:02:40.080 in Syria. And I spoke with one of them, it was one of these criminals that was threatening them.
00:02:50.900 And he would insult them. He would tell them what we did to you in Syria. We'll do it again in Canada.
00:02:56.960 So some of the survivors immediately run to One Free World International. We immediately
00:03:02.640 confronted the callers and the threats and we communicated with our intelligent community
00:03:09.700 and the policing community in Canada. And we reported to the York Regional Police. And right
00:03:14.720 now it's under investigation.
00:03:15.700 Yes, one of them was very graphic. I can't even read it. But it's a man who said, I am your rapist or I was your
00:03:23.380 rapist. We had, you know, Arabic accents, accents that are consistent with the region of the people to where 1.00
00:03:30.120 these fighters are coming from. And you also then have this other dimension, which I think in Canada is
00:03:36.080 particularly significant, which is the way that we deal with resettling people that are from ISIS controlled
00:03:43.520 regions. And it's one thing if these calls were coming from, you know, around the world, which is bad enough.
00:03:49.200 But we're talking about people that government policy may well allow back into the country. 0.99
00:03:53.760 Yeah, this is absolutely foolish. Let's just, if you, if you left Canada to go fight against 0.93
00:04:04.240 Canadian forces, if you left Canada to join a terrorist organization, if you left Canada to commit crimes
00:04:11.040 against humanity, quite honestly, I don't think that you get a second chance. But this is up to our
00:04:18.480 politically correctness, and up to our politically correct prime minister in order to decide, you
00:04:25.200 know, what's good for Canada and what's not good for Canada. I'm saying this in a very sad way, in a
00:04:33.040 very sad way, really. When you talk about the women and girls that have been victimized in this way,
00:04:38.880 and the investigations that are ongoing, do we know where those calls are coming from? Have police
00:04:44.240 made any headway on pinpointing locations? Well, right now, with the new technology that
00:04:50.960 we have today, these calls can be coming from Canada or outside of Canada, and you can just
00:04:56.160 change the phone number. So one of the calls came from Los Angeles, one of the calls came from Syria,
00:05:02.560 one of the calls coming from Canada. It's three different individuals that are threatening these
00:05:07.440 scares. Now, with the new technology, you can have an app where you can put any number from any region.
00:05:14.720 So the police are still investigating that exactly to know and to monitor from where it's coming from,
00:05:19.440 the source of this calls.
00:05:20.160 When we see this, I mean, one question that comes up, how are they tracking down
00:05:26.880 these people? Do we know that?
00:05:28.320 I can tell you by fact that, as I said, is under the investigation, so many of the information is
00:05:34.800 not known to the public yet. But I can tell you that both your regional police and the
00:05:39.360 intelligence units is working on this case, because there is two things that really the
00:05:45.120 policing community have to respond to, two issues here. Number one issue, if this call is coming from
00:05:51.840 inside of Canada or outside of Canada, and if it's outside of Canada, from where? The second issue,
00:05:58.160 who leaked this information of these phone numbers? It's a personal phone numbers, personal contact
00:06:05.200 information of these Yazidi girls, of these victims and survivors here in Canada. Who leaked them? Who
00:06:11.040 leaked all of this information to ISIS fighters in Syria? So this is two issues that the policing
00:06:16.480 community have to respond to. One of the women gave a heartbreaking quote in an interview. She had said
00:06:22.400 that she's scared, and these are people that came to Canada to escape fear, to escape hardship,
00:06:27.840 to escape being victimized by these people. And when we talk about a smart and responsible refugee
00:06:34.320 program in Canada, it has to be that we resettle people that are genuinely facing
00:06:39.040 this type of persecution. So what is it Canada can do better? I mean, these people were given a home
00:06:44.960 in Canada. I don't think any Canadians would object to that. But if they're not feeling safe,
00:06:49.440 what more could be done from a government perspective, if anything?
00:06:52.720 I think our Canadian intelligence security systems have to be aware of who coming to the country.
00:07:01.440 Like, for example, the cases that you mentioned about a woman saw somebody from ISIS in the bus,
00:07:07.680 for example. This has been once we were aware of four different cases similar to this case.
00:07:14.640 Some of it was proven false. Some of it was still under the investigation right now.
00:07:20.640 But in reality, when we're talking about newcomers and we're talking about refugees,
00:07:24.720 we have to focus on the most vulnerable. And the most vulnerable people is the people,
00:07:29.920 the minorities group that are basically facing the killing and the genocide in Iraq and in Syria,
00:07:36.080 such as the Yazidis and the Christians and so on. So we start by our immigration system. Our
00:07:40.960 immigration system has to focus on the most vulnerable. The second thing is our intelligence
00:07:46.000 security system. We are taking refugees just on recommendation of the UNSCR. Well, UNSCR does not
00:07:51.920 present the Canadian government. It's very important that our intelligence have a say. It's very important
00:07:58.080 that we know the background and every and each one that's coming. And it's very important that we know
00:08:03.440 and we have a system. If we found that some of them work with ISIS or leaked ISIS in any way,
00:08:08.400 shape or form, we have to react immediately to arrest them. What do you think needs to be
00:08:14.560 understood by Canadians, if not already, about what these women are going through? Because I know that
00:08:20.480 having read into this, there is just an absolutely horrific, horrific story that each one of them has.
00:08:26.000 And in a lot of cases, I'm not sure Canadians have focused much on the Yazidis.
00:08:30.960 I think in refugee discussions, we typically talk about Syria, we talk about the border that's coming
00:08:36.160 from across the United States into Canada. But I don't know if this particular plight is as well understood.
00:08:42.640 I don't think it's understood as well. I think in general, we have a very serious problem in our
00:08:51.200 country. It's called politically correctness. So we don't like to discuss a group that's facing
00:08:58.080 persecution. We just like to speak in general. With this, it doesn't work. So when we're talking
00:09:04.160 about, for example, the Syrian refugees, our country accepts more than 40,000 Syrian refugees here in
00:09:09.920 Canada. While with the Yazidi community, which is the minority that's facing persecution,
00:09:15.280 they have no militias to protect them in the Middle East. They are just girls and women that
00:09:20.080 face sex slavery and human trafficking. Our government just allowed 1,200 of them.
00:09:26.720 Why is that? Why there is no balance? And what about other groups that need their protection,
00:09:31.040 like the Christians, the Sabines and Mandians, and even the LGBT community in these countries?
00:09:37.200 I think what our country have, what our people have to know is to speak with the Canadian government,
00:09:44.000 to focus on the most vulnerable minority, to give them a fair chance in life and to start healing.
00:09:50.480 How has your organization been able to really involve itself in these cases in the absence of
00:09:56.640 what you say the government could or should be doing more of?
00:09:59.120 We had to. We had no another option. I was myself prisoner back home in Egypt. When I converted from
00:10:08.320 Islam to Christianity, I was tortured. I was severely put in prison and received a death penalty. That's
00:10:14.400 when I escaped. And I came here to Canada as a UNSCR river regime. The truth and the reality that I know 0.85
00:10:22.480 their pain. And we couldn't remain silent. So immediately we started an operation in Iraq where
00:10:28.080 we start risking the scares when we send medical supplies to the refugee camps. But also here in
00:10:33.680 Canada, we start to advocate on their behalf. And with the help with many of the media tools,
00:10:38.240 we was able to put pressure on the Canadian government to bring some results.
00:10:41.520 Well, I'm glad you have been. Reverend Majid El Shafi from One Free World International joining me now.
00:10:47.040 Reverend, thanks as always for your time, sir. God bless.
00:10:49.200 Reverend Majid El Shafi from One Free World International. God bless you too. Thank you.