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Iraq's Yazidis: a Vulnerable Minority

The Yazidis have long been one of the most vulnerable minorities in Iraq and have been particularly targeted by Islamic State jihadists, who have overrun much of the country.

On Thursday, the United Nations said the IS may have committed genocide in trying to wipe out the Yazidi minority, in a report laying out a litany of atrocities, detailing killings, torture, rape, sexual slavery and the use of child soldiers by the extremists.

IS, which controls a swathe of territory in Iraq and neighboring Syria, launched "a series of systematic and widespread attacks on the Yazidi minority's heartland in the northern Nineveh province last August.

According to the report, the attacks appeared intended "to destroy the Yazidi as a group," which "strongly suggests" IS is guilty of "genocide" against the Yazidi.

There are almost 1.5 million Yazidis worldwide, half a million of whom live in Iraq, according to the Vatican's official website.

It said the rest live in Turkey, Georgia, Armenia and in diaspora in many other western countries, notably Germany.

They are mostly impoverished farmers and herders, living in remote corners of Kurdistan's mountains.

Kurdish speakers, they follow a faith born in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago and the Mithraist religion. As time went on they integrated elements of Islam and Christianity.

Yazidis have kept themselves separate as a people, discouraging marriage outside the community and even across their caste system.

Their unique beliefs and practices -- some are known to refrain from eating lettuce and wearing the color blue -- have often been misconstrued as satanic.

In fact they are monotheists, believing in God as creator of the world, which he has placed under the care of seven holy beings or angels, the chief of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel.

Orthodox Muslims consider the Peacock Angel a demon figure and refer to Yazidis as devil-worshipers.

The Yazidis pray in Kurdish, facing the sun and do not have a holy book or a single dogma.

As non-Arab and non-Muslim Iraqis, they have long been one of the country's most vulnerable minorities.

Persecution under dictator Saddam Hussein forced thousands of families to flee the country, mostly to Germany.

Massive truck bombs almost entirely destroyed two small Yazidi villages in northern Iraq on August 14, 2007. More than 400 people died in the explosions.

In August, 2014, the IS launched a broad offensive in northern Iraq, including against the city of Sinjar, in and around which much of the small Yazidi community lived.

Tens of thousands of them fled, many running up Mount Sinjar, a mountain range where they remained stranded without food or water in searing summer temperatures.

According to rights group Amnesty International in December, 2014, IS has targeted Yazidis and other minorities in north Iraq in a campaign it said amounted to ethnic cleansing, murdering civilians and enslaving women and children.

The United States last August launched a coalition force, striking IS positions in northern Iraq.

Its airstrikes have allowed the Iraqi army, which was totally overwhelmed in the first days of the jihadist onslaught, along with Kurdish peshmerga fighters to regain some territory from the IS.

Apart from the Yazidi minority, tens of thousands of Christians in Iraq, most of them faithful to the Chaldean Catholic church, also fled the August onslaught by the IS, which controls numerous towns and villages of the Nineveh Plain.

Source: Agence France Presse


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