Our Threatened Brethren: The Plight of Yazidis in Iraq

Relatives react near the bodily remains of people from the minority Yazidi, who were killed by Islamic State militants, after they were exhumed from a mass grave in Sinjar during a funeral ceremony in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Jan. 22, 2024.

By Adhid Miri, PhD

Part 1

The Yazidi (or Yezidi) are a Kurmanji-speaking minority group who are indigenous to northern Iraq, Kurdistan, and a geographical region in Western Asia. This includes parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Most Yazidis remaining in the Middle East today live in Iraq, primarily in the governorate of Nineveh and Duhok.

Estimates put the global number of Yazidis at around 700,000 people, with most of them concentrated in and around Sinjar, west of the city of Mosul. It also includes the Sheikhan community, the religious center of the sect, located northeast of Mosul. There are small Yazidi communities in Turkey, Iran, Armenia, and Syria.

Isolated geographically and accustomed to discrimination, the Yazidis forged an insular culture. Iraq’s Yazidis rarely intermarry with other groups, and they do not accept religious converts.

Yazidis have historically shared the same political fate as Iraq’s Kurds. In the late 1970s, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein launched brutal Arabization campaigns against the Kurds in the north. At the same time, he razed traditional Yazidi villages and forced the Yazidi to settle in urban centers, disrupting their rural way of life. Hussein constructed the town of Sinjar and forced the Yazidi to abandon their mountain villages and relocate in the city.

The story of the ISIS conquest of the Yazidi homeland in August 2014 is essential for understanding the plight of this endangered community which has faced centuries of what can only be described as a genocidal assault. It is a tragic tale of the followers of a peaceful religion whose very existence is threatened by a combination of fanaticism on the part of ISIS and indifference on the part of Western powers.

Yazidis often say they have been the victim of 72 previous attempts at genocide. Memory of persecution is a core component of their identity.

Identity and Ethnicity

There is disagreement among scholars on whether the Yazidi people are a distinct ethnoreligious group or a religious sub-group of the Kurds, an Iranian ethnic group. There is even disagreement among the Yazidi. Some modern Yazidis identify ethnically as subset of the Kurdish people. Others view themselves as having a distinct ethnic identity as Yazidi.

Yazidi cultural practices are observed in the Kurmanji language, which is also used by almost all their orally transmitted religious traditions. Kurmanji is the northernmost of the Kurdish languages.

In Armenia and Iraq, the Yazidi are recognized as a distinct ethnic group. In Georgia and Germany, they are regarded as ethnic Kurds. The Soviet Union (Russia) registered the Yazidi and the Kurds as two different ethnic groups for the 1926 census but grouped the two together as one ethnicity in the censuses from 1931-1989.

Religious beliefs

Yazidism is the ethnic religion of the Yazidi people and is monotheistic in nature, having roots in a pre-Zoroastrian Iranic faith. The word Yazidi means “the servant of the creator.” Followers colloquially are called “the people of the peacock angel.”

Starting from the 14th century, Yazidis built up their own internal religious and political apparatus in the lands they inhabited. The Yazidi territory was divided into seven administrative centers, each having its own Sincaq, or bronze peacock idol, which serves as a symbol of power for each administrative center.

Yazidi tradition uses many terms, images, and symbols of Sufi or Islamic origin, while to a larger extent preserving pre-Islamic mythology, symbology, rituals, festivals, and traditions.

While some Yazidi practices resemble those of Islam—refraining from eating pork, for example—many practices appear to be unique in the region. Yazidi society is organized into a rigid religious caste system. In addition to venerating the sun, Yazidis, like Zoroastrians, consider fire to be sacred and are not allowed to extinguish it with water or to speak rudely in front of it.

Yazidis do not believe in eternal damnation. Instead, they believe in reincarnation or transmigration of souls through a gradual purification cycle. The souls of sinners are reborn as animals for a probationary period before passing into human form again. Ultimately, their souls ascend to heaven.

Yazidis celebrate the new year in April with colored eggs and have a Feast of Sacrifice, when a sheep is slaughtered by the Baba Sheikh and torches are lit throughout the valley of Lailish, a holy place in their faith.

Yazidis do not accept conversion into their faith and those who marry outside of the community are banned. Excommunication, therefore, has dire implications.

Yazidis are forbidden from wearing the color blue, eating lettuce, and saying the word “Shaytan.”

Melek Tawus

While the Yazidi believe in one God, a central figure in their faith is Melek Tawus (AKA Tawusi Melek or “Peacock Angel”), an angel who defies God and serves as an intermediary between Him and man. Yazidis are dualists—believing in a Creator God, now passive, and Melek Tawus, executive organ of divine will. Some traditional myths say that the Yazidi were the children of Adam alone and not of Eve, and thus separate from the rest of humankind.

To Muslims, the Yazidi account of the defiant angel often sounds like the Quranic rendering of Shaytan—the devil—even though Melek Tawus is a force for good in the Yazidi religion.

The Yazidis’ God is known as Khude and is all forgiving and merciful. God-Khude created himself and seven archangels led by Melek Tawus. The Peacock Angel was sent to Earth to create life from the primordial chaos and act as an intercessor between man and God. The first human had been created without a soul, so Melek Tawus blew the breath of life into him. He then turned Adam towards the Sun, symbol of the Supreme Creator, which Yazidis, like ancient Mesopotamians, still worship.

But it is the sad fate of the Yazidis that the story of Melek Tawus has eerie parallels with the story of Shaytan, the fallen jinn (genie) of Islam who is known in English as Satan.

Yazidis began to face accusations of devil worship from Muslims beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. To this day, Iraqi Yazidis push to put an end to the devil worship stereotype and accusations.

Persecution

The history of the Yazidi community in northern Iraq is laden with oppression and violence. For almost six centuries, Yazidis suffered the persecution of the Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1922). After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, the British Army targeted Yazidis and other ethnic groups in northern Iraq. The violent campaigns against Yazidis continued during the Baath regime that was in power in Iraq from 1968 to 2003.

In the wake of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Yazidis faced increased persecution by religious extremists who incorrectly regarded them as ‘devil worshippers’ due to a misinterpretation of their religion. Community members were regularly targeted by extremists. A July 2008 report from Iraq’s Ministry of Human Rights estimated that between 2003 and the end of 2007, a total of 335 Yazidis had been killed in direct or indirect attacks.

The effect of these and later attacks on the community were often far reaching. During the year 2013, for instance, there were numerous attacks on Yazidi students attending Mosul University. By the end of the year, approximately 2,000 Yazidi students had stopped attending the university.

Most recently, the 2014 Yazidi genocide that was carried out by the Islamic State (ISIS) saw over 5,000 Yazidis killed, with thousands of Yazidi women and girls forced into sexual slavery and the flight of more than 500,000 Yazidi refugees.

It’s not only Yazidis that faced the wrath of ISIS. In the last two decades Iraqi Christians have been reduced by over 80%, from 1.5 million to a couple of hundred thousand. Iraq has no Jews after over two millennia.

Sources: Wikipedia, Yazda.org, Pari Ibrahim, Free Yezidi Foundation, Byavi Asher-Schapiro, National Geographic News, the Guardian, The Yazidis Narrative by Zuhair Kadhum Abood, Le Yezidis in Syria and Mount Sinjar by Roger Lescot, Brian Glyn Williams.