History of International Relations Textbook

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Who are the Yazidis?

News and TV footage reaches us from the town of Sinjar, northern Iraq. A community of people known as the Yazidis, or Yezidis, are under heavy bombardment by ISIL, or ISIS, the fundamentalist Sunni fighters who now are taking over much of Syria and Iraq.  The rest of the world is aghast but it is far from clear what to do. The United States seems prepared to start bombing but bombing hasn’t helped much in the past.

The Yazidis are not Muslim, Christians or Jews, but neither are they mixes of these religions. Not surprisingly most journalists struggle to define them. The Yazidis are mountain people who valley-dwellers can’t categorize.  The Yazidi language is a version of Kurdish, and the Yazidis are usually classified as Kurds, but relations with the mainstream Kurdish community seem strained.  This explains something I’ve been puzzled by: the Kurdish peshmerga soldiers are usually very good at protecting their own and they are also the only ones, it seems, who ISIL doesn’t dare to attack. Why have they left the Yazidis to fend for themselves?

What more than anything bothers the rest of the world is the Yasidi worship of Melek Taus, which both Christians and Muslims have identified as Satan. Yes, Satan.  Yazidis refuse to pronounce words with a “sh” in them, as in “Shaitan.”  The Yazidis, goes the argument, refuse to pronounce the name of their lord. Yet Melek Taus is like no Satan I know or have ever heard of. He came to earth as a spirit but, say the Yazidis, he refused to submit to Adam and his lord.  Instead he presented mankind with a choice between good and evil.  Melek Taus himself represented the good but he wanted human beings to make up their own minds.  This is the whole point of their religion. This is a smart way around the theodicy problem faced by all monotheistic religions — how to explain the existence of evil in a world with a benevolent, and all-powerful, god.  Besides, the Yazidis are mountain people — they have to learn how to think for themselves.

The Yazidis sided with the Americans at the time of the invasion in 2001 and they readily admitted to other Iraqis that they were collaborators.  In fact, Sinjar, once the Americans got to it, looked the way they had hoped all of Iraq would look — with cheerful people lining the streets to celebrate their liberation. The greatest sin of the Yazidis seems consequently to be that they followed “Greater” rather than normal-size Satan. Small minority groups have always looked to empires to protect them from nationalists.  Not surprisingly the large ethnic groups in Iraq were sharpening their knives waiting for the Americans to leave.  When the Americans eventually did, the genocide begun.

Their land is age-old border territory.  The frontier between the Byzantine and the Sasanian empires ran through the main street of Sinjar. There was heavy fighting here some 1,500 years ago too. As American troops entered the town in 2001, Yazidi children were throwing Roman coins at them.

Apparently, the opening sequence of that notorious 1973 movie, The Exorcist, was shot in Sinjar (I have yet to confirm this).  Somehow it would be just typical of the Islamic fundamentalists if they got their notion that the Yazidis are Satan-worshippers from watching this movie. Islamic fundamentalists, like all fundamentalists, know too much about pop culture and not enough about their own religion. Fundamentalists need to return to fundamentals. Meanwhile, leave the Yazidis alone.

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