The Yazidis are dubbed as 'devil worshipers' by ISIS militants
This image made from video taken on Sunday, Aug. 3, 2014 shows Iraqis people from the Yazidi community after arriving in Irbil in northern Iraq after Islamic militants attacked the towns of Sinjar and Zunmar. (Photo: AP)
American airstrikes hit Iraq on Friday morning with a dual purpose: to protect American citizens in Erbil and to shield an ancient religious minority Yazidis from the impending threat of genocide. But who are the Yazidis? Here are 10 things to keep in mind.
1. About 500,000 Yazidis live in Iraq today, although there are about 700,000 total. They speak Kurdish and live in northern Iraq, many clustered near Sinjar.
2. Most who follow the Yazidi faith live in Iraq. While followers also live in Georgia, Turkey and Armenia, many have fled persecution to Australia, Canada, Germany and the U.S.
3. A large community of Yazidi refugees settled in Lincoln, Nebraska. As the crisis in Iraq escalated, the Yazidis of Lincoln took to the streets to plead for help for those stranded in Sinjar.
Displaced Iraqis in the town of Kalak, Iraq, Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014.
Islamic militants attacked the towns of Sinjar and Zunmar few days
ago. The extremist group's capture of a string of towns and villages
in the north has sent minority communities fleeing for their lives. (Photo: AP)
4. The Yazidi religion draws partially from Zoroastrianism and from Islamic Sufism, according to the Yezedi Human Rights Organization. They worship seven angels, the central of which is the fallen “Peacock Angel” — which has led to allegations of devil worship, although the angel was restored to heaven.
5. The religion also claims its origins in an Umayyad Sheikh who was born around 1075 C.E. His tomb, in Lalish, Iraq, is now a popular pilgrimage site for the Yazidis — but it may now be turning into a refugee camp.
6. ISIL calls the Yazidi devil-worshippers and sees destroying religions minorities like the Yazidi and the Iraqi Christians as part of the way to build its caliphate in the region.
In this undated family photo, Mikey Hassan rides in the back of
a pickup truck with a boy in his arms as they flee militants of the
Islamic State group, who took over the city of Sinjar, Iraq. Hassan,
who is Yazidi, says he fled the city with more than a dozen family
members into the Sinjar mountains and then managed to escape
to the Kurdish province of Dohuk after two days by shooting their
way past the militants. (Photo: AP)
7. Past persecution included massacres by the Ottoman Empire. The Yazidi people speak of surviving 72 massacres in that time alone.
8. Although the Yazidi were persecuted under Saddam Hussein, life didn’t get any better for them once he was deposed. When Hussein left, some Sunni Muslim groups radicalized — and the Yazidis were on their target list.
9. Some Yazidis, though, actually fled into Iraq in recent years. The civil war in Syria, as The Economist put it, pits “Kurds against Islamist radicals,” causing the Yazidis of Syria to race across Iraq’s northern border into Kurdish-controlled areas.
In this Monday, Sept. 19, 2005 file photo, a Yazidi man sits on a cliff
above the terraces his village uses for farming on Mount Sinjar, 250
miles (404 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq. Iraqis on Friday. (Photo: AP)
10. Currently, about 40,000 Yazidis are stranded on a mountain just outside of Sinjar — their ancestral home — starving and dying of thirst. If they leave, they face getting slaughtered. Sinjar is the ancestral home of the Yazidi.
( Source : dc )
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