Yazidi

The Yazidis (Êzidî) are an ethno-religious people of the borderlands of northern Iraq, Syria and Turkiye who speak Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish) and follow Yazidism, an ancient monotheistic faith centred on God's seven holy beings led by Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock Angel, and on the 12th-century Sufi master Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, whose tomb at Lalish near Mosul is their holiest shrine. Their heartlands are Mount Sinjar (Shingal) on the Syrian border and the Sheikhan district around Lalish, with historic communities in Syria's Jazira and Afrin, Turkiye's Tur Abdin and Batman, and, since flight from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Armenia and Georgia. Membership comes only by birth to two Yazidi parents, and society is divided into three endogamous castes: sheikhs, pirs and murids (lay followers), the latter organised in tribes such as the Haweri, Mihirkan, Qiran and Hababa. Yazidi oral history counts 74 campaigns of extermination (ferman) against them, from Ottoman expeditions to the Islamic State's genocide of August 2014, in which more than 5,000 were killed and some 6,400 women and children abducted. Whether Yazidis are Kurds is contested: many see themselves as a distinct people, while others call themselves Kurds of the original Kurdish religion. Names include Yezidi, Êzidî and Ezdi; outsiders long and wrongly called them 'devil-worshippers' because of misunderstandings of Tawûsî Melek.

Yazidi life revolves around family, caste and village. Marriage must be within the faith and within one's caste, and is arranged between families; leaving the community by marrying out traditionally means exclusion. Sinjar Yazidis were farmers and shepherds growing wheat, barley, figs, olives and tobacco on the mountain's terraces, while Sheikhan villages had olive groves and orchards. Men traditionally wore white, and women white dresses and head-scarves; several colours, especially blue, were avoided, along with certain foods such as lettuce. Religious knowledge is passed on orally through qewl (sacred hymns) sung by qewals with the def and shibab flute, and through stories and lamentations. The great festivals are Çarşema Sor (Red Wednesday, the April New Year), when houses are decorated with red flowers and coloured eggs, the seven-day autumn assembly (Cejna Cemaiya) at Lalish, and the December fast and feast of Ezid. Yazidi music, dance (govend) and wedding customs share much with Kurmanji Kurdish culture.

Yazidis believe in one God who entrusted the world to seven holy beings, chief of them Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock Angel; they reject the idea of a devil. Sheikh Adi and other holy figures are venerated as incarnations of these beings. Every Yazidi has a sheikh and a pir as spiritual guides and a 'brother or sister of the hereafter' (birayê axretê). Practices include praying at sunrise and sunset facing the sun, pilgrimage to Lalish, where pilgrims walk barefoot, tie knots of silk at the shrine of Sheikh Adi and are baptised at the Kaniya Spî (White Spring), baptism of children (mor kirin), and visits to the shrines (mezar) that dot Sinjar and Sheikhan. The community is led by the Mir (Prince), currently Hazim Tahsin Beg, and the spiritual council at Lalish, with the Baba Sheikh as chief religious authority (Ali Ilyas since 2020). After 2014 the spiritual council allowed women freed from Islamic State captivity to return to the faith through a purification at Lalish, an important change; children born of rape remain a painful unresolved question. Displacement, emigration and the secular outlook of diaspora youth are weakening religious knowledge, while the genocide has strengthened communal identity.

Yazidis speak Kurmanji, so they can use the complete Kurmanji Bible in Latin script, the Behdini New Testament and portions in Arabic script, the Jesus Film and Global Recordings Network audio in Kurmanji and Behdini. Because Yazidi identity is inherited and conversion means leaving family and community, very few have become Christians; small groups of Yazidi believers exist in Armenia, Georgia, Germany and the United States, often through Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Yazidi leaders have accused Christian aid groups in the camps of proselytising, which makes relief-based witness sensitive. Assyrian and Chaldean Christians in the Nineveh Plains are long-standing neighbours who shared displacement with Yazidis in 2014.

On 3 August 2014 Islamic State fighters overran Sinjar after Peshmerga forces withdrew. Men and older boys who could not escape were shot in villages such as Kocho, women and girls were taken as slaves and sold across Iraq and Syria, and boys were forced into training as fighters. Tens of thousands fled onto Mount Sinjar without water in the August heat until a corridor opened through Syria with the help of Kurdish fighters and US airstrikes. Estimates put the dead at 5,000-10,000 and the abducted at about 6,400, of whom about 3,500 had been freed by the mid-2020s. The United Nations investigative team (UNITAD), the Iraqi parliament, Germany's Bundestag (2023) and other parliaments recognise the attack as genocide, and the Yazidi Survivors Law of 2021 provides reparations for survivors. Nadia Murad, a survivor from Kocho, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.