The Yazidis: A Faith Persecuted for a Misreading
The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking ethnoreligious community of northern Iraq. Their faith centers on one God and seven holy beings headed by Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel, and you cannot join it. This explainer covers Yazidi theology, oral scripture, caste and lineage, the shrine at Lalish, the origin of the devil-worship libel, and the persecution that culminated in the 2014 Sinjar genocide.
What is the Yazidi faith, and who are the Yazidis?
The Yazidi faith is the monotheistic religion of the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking ethnoreligious community whose heartland is northern Iraq and who call themselves Ezidi. Yazidis worship one God, Xwede, who made the world and then withdrew from its daily management, entrusting it to seven holy beings led by Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel. You cannot join. Membership passes by birth to two Yazidi parents, no conversion procedure exists, and the community is divided into three endogamous castes: the murids, who are the laity, and the sheikhs and pirs who are their hereditary religious guides. Estimates of the world population vary widely and none of them rests on an enumeration: scholarly reference works written in the early 2000s put the figure at two to three hundred thousand, while Yazidi organizations and recent news reporting commonly give 700,000 to a million. The largest concentrations are in the Nineveh plains and the Sinjar district of Iraq, with communities in Armenia, Georgia and Syria and the largest diaspora in Germany, where the count has climbed from some forty thousand at the turn of the century to figures now given in the hundreds of thousands. Yazidis are not Muslims, Christians or Zoroastrians, and the religion has no book at its center in the way those traditions do. What holds it together is oral, hereditary and local: hymns memorized by specialist reciters, obligations owed to particular families, and one valley, Lalish, that every Yazidi is expected to visit.
The name is contested, and the contest matters. Many Yazidis connect Ezidi to Ezid, or Sultan Ezid, a divine figure in their own tradition, and some writers link that in turn to the Old Iranian yazata, a being worthy of worship. The prevailing view among Western scholars runs the other way. Christine Allison, who wrote the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on the Yazidis, records the academic consensus as a derivation from the Umayyad caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya, who died in 683 and whose name is loathed across Shia Islam. The uncomfortable part is not that enemies invented that link. It is that Yazidi tradition itself venerates Yazid ibn Muawiya as an incarnation of Sultan Ezid, so a genuine feature of the religion has been read back at the community as an accusation. Ethnic identity is argued over too. Most Yazidis in Iraq describe themselves as Kurds who kept the original Kurdish religion, while many Yazidis in Armenia and parts of the diaspora hold that they are a separate people whose language happens to be Kurdish. Armenia's post-Soviet censuses count Yezidis as a nationality distinct from Kurds, which gives the separatist position an official record to point at. Neither position is a fringe one, and outsiders who pick a side on the community's behalf usually do it to serve an argument of their own.
Who leads the Yazidi community?
Two offices sit at the top. The Mir, a hereditary prince from the family based at Baadre in Sheikhan, holds temporal and spiritual authority, and the Baba Sheikh leads the sheikhs and is widely regarded as the spiritual head. Mir Tahsin Said Beg died in Germany on 28 January 2019, after holding the office since 1944, and his son Hazim was enthroned that July. Below them come the Baba Chawush, the resident custodian of Lalish, and the faqirs, kocheks and qewwals.
How is Yazidism related to the Yarsan and Alevi traditions?
Yazidism, Yarsanism and Alevism are separate religions that grew up among Kurdish and Anatolian populations and share a family resemblance: reincarnation, divinity manifested in human teachers, hereditary holy lineages, and hymns rather than scripture. The resemblance is real, but no line of descent between them has been documented. Yarsanis have their own sacred poetry in Gorani, and Alevism developed out of Anatolian Shia currents with no reference to Lalish.
What is Ezidkhan?
Ezidkhan means the land of the Yazidis and names the territory Yazidis regard as their historic homeland: Sinjar, Sheikhan, the Nineveh plains villages of Bashiqa and Bahzani, and the districts of southeastern Turkey and northern Syria that Yazidis inhabited before the twentieth century emptied most of them. The word now carries a political claim to self-administration that Yazidi groups have pressed since 2014.
Who is Melek Taus, and why is the Peacock Angel central to Yazidi belief?
Melek Taus, more accurately Tawusi Melek in Kurmanji, is the chief of the seven holy beings in Yazidi belief and the deputy through whom God governs the created world. God made the world and handed its administration to the Heptad, and Tawusi Melek heads that body. He is represented as a peacock and honored in cast bronze standards called sanjaks. The story attached to him is the one outsiders seize on: commanded to bow before the newly made Adam, he refused, on the ground that he had been created to bow to God alone. Yazidis read that refusal as the strongest available proof of loyalty and of strict monotheism, and in the Yazidi telling God rewards him with authority over the world rather than punishing him. In a widely recited version he then wept for seven thousand years, and his tears filled seven jars that put out the fires of hell. Yazidis reject any reading of him as evil or in revolt, and the hymns do not present him that way. Scholars who work on the texts do describe the figure as an ambiguous one, in that he allots blessing and misfortune as he sees fit and is not to be questioned, but ambiguity of that kind is not rebellion. He is closer to a regent than to a rival, and prayer addressed to him is understood as prayer inside the worship of one God.
The Heptad's membership varies between hymns and between regions, which is ordinary for a religion carried in poetry rather than creed. Most lists include Sheikh Adi himself, his companion Sheikh Hasan, and the four called the Mysteries: Shemsedin, who is bound to the sun, along with Fakhredin, Sejadin and Nasirdin. Some lists identify Sheikh Adi with Tawusi Melek instead and add Sheikh Obekr in the empty place, which is the kind of variation a religion carried in verse tolerates without difficulty. Those figures are angels and historical men at the same time, holy people of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries around Sheikh Adi whose descendants became the sheikh families still serving Yazidi laity today. That doubling, an eternal being who also walked around a specific valley in a specific century, is the hardest part of Yazidism for outsiders trained on a clean division between God and history. The peacock standards were carried on tawusgeran circuits through Yazidi villages by qewwals, who collected alms and brought the shrine to people who could not reach it. The standards are traditionally counted as seven, and only some survive. The circuits were cut back severely during the twentieth century as international borders hardened, which left the communities in the Caucasus effectively severed from the religious center at Lalish.
Why are there seven holy beings in Yazidism?
Seven is the size of the Heptad, the haft sirr or seven mysteries, the beings God created from his own light before the world and to whom he assigned its running. The number is not a code. Sevens recur widely across Near Eastern religion, and Yazidis treat theirs as cosmology rather than as symbolism to be unpacked. Readers after the numerological reading of seven should see Angel Number 777 Meaning: Divine Guidance & Spiritual Awakening instead.
Why a peacock?
No Yazidi text on record explains the choice, and scholars have not settled it. Peacocks are not native to the mountains of northern Iraq, so the image came from somewhere else. Indian and Persian art, where the bird carries solar and royal associations, is the usual guess. The peacock also turns up in Islamic angel stories. The bird is an image of Tawusi Melek rather than an object of veneration in itself.
Do Yazidis pray to Melek Taus?
Yes, and as monotheists. Yazidis address Tawusi Melek in prayer and in hymn as God's appointed regent rather than as a second god. Yazidi religious language moves easily between God, Tawusi Melek and Sheikh Adi, sometimes inside a single line of a qewl, because all three are understood as faces of one divine reality rather than as members of a pantheon.
Why are Yazidis wrongly called devil worshippers?
Yazidis are called devil worshippers because Muslim neighbors, and later European travelers, mapped the story of Tawusi Melek refusing to bow to Adam onto the Quranic account of Iblis, who refuses the same command and is cursed for it. The two stories share a scene and reach opposite verdicts. In the Quran the refusal is pride and earns damnation. In the Yazidi telling it is fidelity to God alone and earns authority over the world. Two further details hardened the identification. Some Islamic lore gave Iblis the epithet peacock of the angels, which made the match look exact to anyone already suspicious. And Yazidis avoid saying the word Satan, along with a handful of words that resemble it in sound, a taboo outsiders read as fearful reverence rather than as refusal to name something. The label was never a harmless mistake. Because Yazidis were classed as devil worshippers rather than People of the Book, they held no protected status under Ottoman law until 1849, when provision for protecting them was finally made, and enforcement after that date was uneven. The gap left them legally exposed to forced conversion, conscription and massacre. Readers looking for the Western esoteric Devil should see The Devil Tarot Card Meaning: Upright, Reversed, Love and Career, a symbol with no connection to this community.
Two Arabic manuscripts did enormous damage. The Mishefa Res, or Black Book, and the Kiteba Cilwe, the Book of Revelation, surfaced in the Mosul manuscript trade around 1900 and were published in 1911 and 1913 as the secret scriptures of the Yazidis. Specialists now generally hold that the manuscripts were written by non-Yazidis for European buyers who had made both their interest and their expectations very clear. The picture is not entirely clean. Some of the content does match Yazidi oral tradition, and writings under those two titles appear to have been known inside the community long before the manuscripts appeared, so the labels are older than the fakes carrying them. The manuscripts were quoted as proof for the better part of a century anyway. The charge was revived with lethal intent in October 2014, when the Islamic State published an article titled The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour in the fourth issue of its English-language magazine Dabiq, arguing that Yazidis were mushrikun, polytheists, rather than People of the Book, and that their women could therefore be enslaved lawfully. A libel that had circulated for centuries as an insult was written up as a legal justification for genocide inside a single article. Yazidi organizations now correct the phrase wherever it appears, and careful writing in English has mostly dropped it.
Is Tawusi Melek the same being as Satan?
No. Yazidis reject the identification outright, and the two figures have incompatible roles. Satan in Islamic and Christian belief is a rebel, cursed and set against God until the end of time. Tawusi Melek is God's obedient deputy, forgiven if he required forgiving at all, and Yazidi cosmology contains no eternal adversary. Yazidi mythology does carry descriptions of heaven and hell, but nothing of the Satan type presides over them.
Why will Yazidis not say the word Satan?
Yazidis avoid the word Shaytan, and also words containing the same consonants that might recall it. Saying it aloud is treated as a grave insult to Tawusi Melek, which is close to the reverse of the fearful reverence outsiders inferred. Scholars have pointed out that the existence of the taboo does imply some perceived link between the two figures, and the reason for that link has not been settled. Observance varies, and younger Yazidis in the diaspora often keep the rule without treating it as central to their faith.
Who first put devil worshipper into English?
Nineteenth-century European travelers, missionaries and archaeologists working in Ottoman Mesopotamia carried the phrase into English. Austen Henry Layard, who excavated Nimrud in the 1840s, wrote at length and with some sympathy about the Yazidis he met near Mosul, but the sensational label traveled faster than his qualifications did. Popular writing repeated it for the next hundred and fifty years, and travel journalism still reaches for it.
What do Yazidis believe about creation, the soul and reincarnation?
Yazidis hold that God made a white pearl containing everything that would exist, kept it for an age, and then broke it open so that the material world spilled out and was arranged by the seven holy beings. Human souls in this scheme do not go to an eternal reward or an eternal punishment. They are reborn. The phrase Yazidis use is kiras guhorin, changing the garment, and it treats the body as clothing the soul puts on and takes off across many lives. A soul is purified across those lives by its own conduct and by the intercession of the holy beings, which is why Yazidism has no need of a permanent hell and, in most tellings, has no hell at all once Tawusi Melek's tears have extinguished it. Every Yazidi is also tied to a personal sheikh and a personal pir, whose lineages are fixed by the person's own descent rather than picked, and takes a brother or sister of the hereafter, normally from a sheikh family, who performs the rites at marriage and at death. These bonds carry obligations during life as well as at the end of it. Rebirth is not described as a punishment, and no fixed number of lives is specified.
None of this is set out in a catechism. It lives in the qewls, and the qewls disagree with one another on details in ways that would be scandalous in a religion with a settled doctrinal authority. Creation accounts differ over the sequence and over the names, and Yazidis do not generally treat those differences as a problem needing resolution. The reincarnation doctrine is the clearest Iranian element in the religion and marks it off sharply from the Abrahamic faiths that surround it. It has social consequences outsiders miss, too. Because the soul returns, death is spoken of with less finality, and the massacres of the past are sometimes discussed in terms of who has come back since. Christine Allison and Eszter Spat, both of whom worked directly with Yazidi communities in Iraq, have described how much of this belief is carried in ordinary conversation rather than through formal instruction. A child hears the creation story at a feast, in verse, from someone who assumes the rest is already known.
Do Yazidis believe in heaven and hell?
Yazidi tradition holds no settled doctrine of eternal hell. The dominant account has Tawusi Melek's tears, wept over seven thousand years, filling seven jars and quenching hellfire, which leaves purification through rebirth as the mechanism by which souls are corrected. Descriptions of paradise and of hell do appear in Yazidi mythology, and scholars have noted that they sit awkwardly beside the belief in rebirth, as though the two ideas arrived from different directions. What is missing is the sharp two-destination afterlife familiar from Christianity and Islam.
What is kiras guhorin?
Kiras guhorin translates as changing the garment and is the Yazidi term for reincarnation. The body is the garment. The soul wears one out and receives another. Yazidis apply the idea to holy beings as well as to ordinary people, which is how the same figure can be an angel present at creation and a twelfth-century man from the Lalish valley without any contradiction arising.
What is a brother or sister of the hereafter?
The biraye axirete, brother of the hereafter, and its female counterpart, the sister of the hereafter, are usually described as taken around puberty and drawn normally from a sheikh family. The holder performs certain rites at marriage and at death and stands with that soul in the next world. It is one of three religious bonds every Yazidi carries, alongside the personal sheikh and the personal pir, and those two are set by descent rather than picked. The relationship runs both ways for life.
Where does Yazidism come from, and how does it relate to Zoroastrianism, Sufism and Christianity?
Yazidism took its present form in the Kurdish mountains between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, around the figure of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, a Sufi of Umayyad descent from the Bekaa valley in what is now Lebanon, who settled in the valley of Lalish and died there around 1162. Sheikh Adi founded a Sufi order, the Adawiyya. Within a few generations of his death that order had become something his own teachers would not have recognized: a separate religion, outside Islam, which absorbed older western Iranian religious material and treated Sheikh Adi himself as a manifestation of the divine. The Sufi layer remains visible in the vocabulary. Sheikh, pir, faqir and khirqa all came from Islamic mysticism and were repurposed as hereditary offices and objects. The Iranian layer shows in reincarnation and in the reverence given to the sun and to the purity of fire, water, earth and air. The Christian resemblances, including infant baptism with spring water and the sharing of blessed bread, most plausibly came from centuries of life alongside Assyrian and Armenian neighbors in the same mountains rather than from any shared origin. The break with Islam hardened under Sheikh Adi's successors. Only two generations after Sheikh Adi the movement had grown large enough to come into open conflict with the ruler of Mosul, Badr al-Din Lulu, who had its leader Hasan ibn Adi killed in 1246. Sheikh Adi's tomb at Lalish was razed in a later battle, in 1414, and rebuilt afterward.
Calling Yazidism Zoroastrian, as Kurdish nationalist writing sometimes does, does not survive contact with either religion. Zoroastrianism sets a good creator against a hostile principle in a cosmic dualism, has a scripture in the Avesta, an ordained priesthood trained in a liturgical language, and a doctrine of individual judgment. Yazidism has none of those things. What the two share is a common western Iranian religious inheritance, several centuries and a mountain range apart. The weighting of the Islamic contribution is argued over as well. Kreyenbroek reads the Sufi material as a frame laid over older Iranian belief, while other scholars give the Adawiyya order more weight as the actual origin of Yazidism rather than as its packaging. Both positions accept the same chronology. The disagreement is about proportion, not about whether a twelfth-century Sufi sheikh sits at the historical root. Yazidis themselves date their religion far earlier than any scholar does. That claim has also been put to political use. Kurdish nationalist writing has promoted the Zoroastrian reading, because an ancient pre-Islamic Kurdish faith is useful to an argument about who held these mountains first, while in the Caucasus a hypothesis of Babylonian origins has been favored instead. Christine Allison's point about all of these accounts is that they track the political climate in which they were produced more closely than they track any evidence. Many Yazidis now resist that framing, and the peshmerga withdrawal from Sinjar in August 2014 is the reason most often given.
Who was Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir?
Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir was a Sufi ascetic of Umayyad descent, born around 1075 in the Bekaa valley in what is now Lebanon. He studied in Baghdad under Abu al-Khayr Hammad al-Dabbas, alongside Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, then withdrew early in the twelfth century to the valley of Lalish, some thirty-six miles northeast of Mosul. He died in 1162. By the standards of his own day he was a figure of undoubted orthodoxy. His tomb at Lalish is the holiest site in Yazidism, and Yazidis venerate him as a manifestation of the divine rather than merely as a founder.
Are Yazidis Muslims?
No. Yazidism is a separate religion rather than a sect of Islam, despite having grown out of a Sufi order and kept a good deal of Islamic vocabulary. Yazidis do not recite the shahada, do not perform the five daily Muslim prayers, do not fast during Ramadan and do not make the hajj. Yazidi leaders and Muslim authorities agree on this, having disagreed on nearly everything else.
Why do Yazidis venerate the sun?
Yazidi prayer is described as facing the rising, noon and setting sun, though observance of all three has never been universal. Yazidis treat sunlight, fire, water, earth and air as holy in themselves rather than as symbols of something else, and protect that purity with taboos against spitting on earth, water or fire. Sheikh Shems, one of the seven holy beings, is bound to the sun, and his shrine at Lalish is placed to catch it. The practice is Iranian in ancestry, though Yazidis do not describe it as inherited from anyone.
What are the Yazidi sacred texts, and how is the religion actually passed down?
Yazidism has no book. Its scripture is oral: several hundred qewls, religious hymns in the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, along with beyts, prayers and narrative chiroks, held in the memory of hereditary specialists called qewwals and recited to a frame drum and a flute. The qewwal families come from two villages on the Nineveh plain, Bashiqa and Bahzani, and the office passes from father to son. Two Arabic pamphlets sold to European collectors around 1900, the Black Book and the Book of Revelation, still circulate in English as Yazidi scripture and are nothing of the kind. What a Yazidi actually knows about the religion depends on lineage and locality. A faqir keeps rules a lay murid does not. A qewwal carries hymns most Yazidis have never heard in full. Villages a day's walk apart preserve different versions of the same story, and nobody adjudicates between them. There is no seminary, no weekly congregational sermon and no mission. Religious knowledge reaches an ordinary Yazidi through the assigned sheikh, the assigned pir, the family, and the annual feasts. The arrangement distributes the religion across the community instead of storing it anywhere, which is durable against many things and fragile against one: the scattering of the families who hold the parts.
Recording changed the situation. A handful of qewls appeared in a Kurdish folklore anthology published in Moscow in 1978, and in 1979 two young Yazidi intellectuals, Khidir Sileman and Khalil Jindy, printed a collection in Baghdad that caused a serious argument inside the community. Philip Kreyenbroek, whose 1995 study Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition is a standard reference on the religion, later published a large body of hymns and narratives together with Khalil Jindy Rashow, one of those two, in a 2005 volume titled God and Sheikh Adi are Perfect. The community was divided about the project. Fixing an oral text in print removes the variation that let each qewwal transmit a living version, and it hands outsiders material never meant for them. The counter-argument won on demographics. Displacement, mass emigration to Germany and the collapse of village life have broken the chain of transmission in places, and young Yazidis in Germany now learn hymns from recordings rather than from a visiting qewwal. Readers interested in organized religion and priesthood treated as symbols should see The Hierophant Tarot Card Meaning: Upright, Reversed, Love and Career. The offices described here are real jobs held by real families.
What is a qewl?
A qewl is a Yazidi religious hymn in Kurmanji, composed in verse, transmitted orally and performed by qewwals on formal occasions to the def, a frame drum, and the shibab, a flute. Qewls carry the religion's cosmology, its accounts of creation and its praise of the holy beings. Their meaning is often compressed to the point of obscurity and needs a teacher to open it up.
Are the Black Book and the Book of Revelation real Yazidi scriptures?
No. Both surfaced around 1900 in Arabic manuscripts sold to Western collectors, and specialists treat them as late products shaped by what those buyers expected to find. Some content may echo genuine Yazidi motifs picked up from informants. The community does not read them, teach them or treat them as authoritative, and they remain the single most common source of error in English writing about the religion.
Can outsiders read or study Yazidi religious texts?
Published collections of qewls exist in Kurmanji with translations, and academic study of them is welcomed by parts of the Yazidi leadership and resented by others who consider the material theirs alone. Yazidism also has esoteric layers reserved for particular lineages, and nothing of that kind is published here or anywhere responsibly. Reading a hymn in translation is not the same as having been taught it.
What do Yazidis practice day to day, and why does everything lead to Lalish?
Daily Yazidi practice is short, private and oriented to the sun. Formal prayer is largely a matter of personal preference rather than a strict obligation, and the pattern travelers wrote down, facing the sun at dawn, noon and sunset, is better understood as an ideal than as a universal habit. The gestures that accompany it include kissing the rounded collar of the sacred shirt. There is no congregational service of the kind a mosque or a church holds. The calendar carries more weight than the day does. Yazidis keep a three-day fast in December, the fast of Ezid, followed by a feast. They mark the new year on the first Wednesday of April in the Julian reckoning, Charshema Sor or Red Wednesday, when Tawusi Melek is said to have descended to earth, when eggs are dyed and doorways are decorated with red anemones. Every observance points back to one valley. Lalish, north of Mosul, holds the tomb of Sheikh Adi, the sacred springs and the shrines of the holy beings, and every Yazidi is expected to make the pilgrimage there at least once in a lifetime. The seven-day autumn Feast of the Assembly gathers the community, the leadership and the qewwals in the valley at the same time each year. Sacrifice, processions with the sacred standards, communal meals and the bathing of ritual objects fill the week, and the leadership handles community business while everyone is present.
Lalish is entered barefoot. Visitors step over rather than on the threshold of the shrine, a rule enforced gently and without exception, and olive oil lamps are lit along the walls at dusk. Lalish has two sacred springs, Zamzam, which rises in a cave beneath the sanctuary of Sheikh Adi, and Kaniya Sipi, the White Spring. Water from the White Spring is used for the baptism of infants, a rite Yazidis call mor kirin, and Yazidis returning after long absence are washed there as well. Water from the springs is also mixed with earth from the valley into small molded balls, barat, which pilgrims take away and which have a part in marriage and funeral rites. The valley has a permanent custodian, the Baba Chawush, and a small resident staff rather than a congregation. After 2014 Lalish took on a role nobody had designed for it. Women and girls who escaped Islamic State captivity were received in the valley and ritually washed. The leadership staged it publicly and on purpose, so that nobody could argue rape or forced conversion had put a woman outside the religion. For a religion with no mechanism for admitting anyone at all, that came as close to a doctrinal change as the community has made in living memory.
When is the Yazidi new year?
Charshema Sor, Red Wednesday, falls on the first Wednesday of April in the Julian calendar, which places it in mid-April by the Gregorian one. Yazidis dye eggs, decorate doorways with red flowers, visit family graves and avoid ordinary work. The dyed eggs are read against the creation account in which the primordial pearl breaks open and the world comes out of it.
Do Yazidis fast?
Yazidis keep a three-day fast in December known as the fast of Ezid, ending in a feast, and faqirs and other religious specialists keep additional fasts the laity does not attempt. The daily fast runs from dawn to sunset. Observance is uneven, and diaspora Yazidis often keep the December fast as the one obligation they carry intact into a new country.
Can non-Yazidis visit Lalish?
Visitors of other faiths can and do visit Lalish, and the site is not closed to outsiders in the way some Yazidi religious knowledge is closed. Shoes come off at the boundary, the threshold is stepped over rather than trodden on, photography is restricted in places and parts of the complex are reserved. Access has fluctuated with security across Nineveh since 2014.
What is the history of Yazidi persecution, from the firmans to the 2014 Sinjar genocide?
Yazidis count their persecution in firmans, an Ottoman word for a royal decree that Yazidi usage turned into the word for an attempt to wipe them out, and the traditional count had reached seventy-two, after which the 2007 truck bombings near Sinjar were counted as the seventy-third and the Islamic State assault of 2014 as the seventy-fourth. The phrase seventy-fourth firman is now the standard Yazidi name for what happened in 2014, and scholars writing about the genocide use it too. The structural cause was legal. Because Yazidis were classed as devil worshippers rather than People of the Book, they held no protected status under Ottoman law until the middle of the nineteenth century, so campaigns against them carried little cost. The nineteenth century was especially violent. The Kurdish leaders Muhammad Pasha of Rawanduz and Bedir Khan Beg of Bohtan attacked Yazidi districts in 1832 and in the 1840s respectively, and the Ottoman official Omer Wehbi Pasha ran a campaign in the early 1890s that seized Lalish and pressed forced conversion and conscription. Under the Baath government Yazidis were registered as Arabs, moved off their land and concentrated into collective settlements in Sinjar during the 1970s, which is why they were living in dense clusters in 2014. On 3 August 2014 the Islamic State took Sinjar. Men and older boys were shot in groups, thousands of women and children were carried off, and a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded in a report published in June 2016 that the campaign was genocide. A household survey of displaced Yazidis later estimated that about 9,900 people were killed or kidnapped in the space of a few days, roughly 2.5 percent of the Yazidi population of the area.
The decade since has been a slow argument about recognition and return. Mass graves around Sinjar were documented from 2015, and the first exhumations began at the village of Kocho in 2019. The United Nations set up an investigative team, UNITAD, under Security Council resolution 2379 of September 2017 to gather evidence for prosecutions. Its mandate ended on 17 September 2024 at the Iraqi government's request, with an unresolved argument running about how much of its archive would remain accessible and to whom. The first genocide conviction anywhere for these crimes came from a German court in Frankfurt in November 2021, which sentenced an Iraqi man over the death of a five-year-old Yazidi girl he had chained outside in the sun. Germany's Bundestag recognized the killings as genocide in January 2023. Iraq passed the Yazidi Female Survivors Law in 2021, promising reparations, land and pensions, and implementation has been slow enough that survivors have organized publicly to demand it. Nadia Murad, who escaped captivity in 2014, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.
What was the 2007 Qahtaniya bombing?
On 14 August 2007 coordinated truck bombs destroyed much of the Yazidi towns of Qahtaniya and Siba Sheikh Khidir near Sinjar. The dead were never properly counted. Published estimates ran from about three hundred to nearly eight hundred, which makes it one of the deadliest single attacks of the entire Iraq war. Threats against Yazidis as unbelievers had been circulating in the district for months beforehand.
What happened on Mount Sinjar in August 2014?
Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled onto Mount Sinjar as the Islamic State took the towns below, and were trapped there in August heat without water or shade. Kurdish fighters from Syria and PKK units from Turkey opened a corridor off the northern face. American airstrikes began on 8 August 2014. A retrospective household survey of displaced Yazidis, carried out in camps in late 2015 by Valeria Cetorelli and colleagues and published in PLOS Medicine in 2017, put the number killed in those days at about 3,100, with nearly half executed and the rest dying on the mountain of starvation, dehydration or injury during the siege. Children were estimated at 93 percent of those who died on the mountain itself, a figure the authors report with a wide margin of uncertainty.
Has anyone been prosecuted for the Yazidi genocide?
A small number, almost all of them in Europe. Frankfurt delivered the first genocide conviction for crimes against Yazidis in November 2021, sentencing an Iraqi man named Taha al-Jumailly to life, and German and Swedish courts have since tried other returnees. Inside Iraq, defendants are generally tried under counterterrorism law. That produces death sentences without ever naming the genocide or leaving a public record of what was done to whom.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Yazidis are there in the world today?
Nobody knows, and the range is wide enough to be worth stating plainly. No reliable census of Yazidis has ever been taken. Scholarly reference works written in the early 2000s put the worldwide figure at two to three hundred thousand, while estimates from Yazidi organizations and recent news reporting run from about 700,000 to a little over one million. Iraq held the large majority before 2014, and United Nations and Kurdish officials estimated the Yazidi population of the Sinjar area alone at roughly 400,000 at the time of the attack. Germany now hosts the largest community outside the Middle East, built first by Yazidis leaving Turkey in the later twentieth century under pressure of religious persecution, then by Iraqi arrivals in the 1990s and after 2014. Armenia counts roughly thirty thousand Yazidis, its largest ethnic minority. Smaller communities live in Georgia, Russia, Syria, Australia and Canada.
Can you convert to Yazidism or marry into the community?
No. Yazidism admits members only by birth to two Yazidi parents, and there is no conversion rite, instruction period or path in for an outsider who wants one. Marriage must also stay inside the community and inside one of the three castes: a murid marries a murid, a sheikh a sheikh, a pir a pir. A Yazidi who marries out has traditionally been treated as lost to the religion. Diaspora Yazidis argue about this constantly, and the leadership has not moved on conversion.
What language do Yazidis speak?
Most Yazidis speak Kurmanji, the northern dialect of Kurdish, and the entire body of religious hymns is in Kurmanji. The reciters are the interesting case. The qewwal clans settled at Bashiqa and Bahzani are of two kinds, one Kurmanji-speaking and one Arabic-speaking, so part of the group charged with carrying the hymns transmits them in a language it does not use at home. Yazidis in Armenia and Georgia also speak Armenian, Georgian and Russian, and the large German-born generation grows up with German first and Kurmanji at home.
Why do Yazidis avoid the color blue and certain foods?
Yazidi practice includes several avoidances, of which the best known are wearing blue and eating lettuce. The reasons are not agreed even inside the community, and the scholarly literature records no settled explanation for either. The account most often offered for the lettuce rule is a matter of sound: the Kurdish word for lettuce, khas, resembles khass, the term for a holy being. No comparable explanation for the blue rule has been established, and readers should treat the confident ones they meet online as guesses. Prohibitions on fish, cockerel, gazelle and certain vegetables are attested in some districts and not others, and the avoidance of pork looks like a custom taken up from Muslim neighbors rather than a specifically Yazidi rule. Observance is uneven, is reported as relaxed when men of religion are not present, and is weakening in the diaspora.
What happened to the Yazidi women and girls captured by ISIS in 2014?
Roughly six to seven thousand Yazidis, overwhelmingly women and children, were abducted in August 2014 and distributed among Islamic State fighters through organized markets, with systematic rape and forced conversion. The 2017 household survey of displaced Yazidis gave a central estimate of 6,800 kidnapped, which matched the lists compiled by local authorities and human rights groups. Many escaped, were ransomed by relatives at ruinous cost, or were freed as the group lost territory. Kurdish authorities and Yazidi organizations have put the number still unaccounted for in the low thousands, and individual women were still being recovered more than a decade after the attack. The Baba Sheikh of the time, Khurto Hajji Ismail, declared publicly after the attack that women returning from captivity remained Yazidi, and they were received and ritually washed at Lalish.
Where do Yazidis live now, and have they been able to return to Sinjar?
Return has been partial. Large numbers of Yazidis displaced in 2014 spent a decade in camps in the Duhok governorate of Iraqi Kurdistan, and pressure to close those camps has grown without matching reconstruction in Sinjar, where whole villages remain rubble and services are thin. Sinjar is also contested by several armed forces and subject to periodic Turkish airstrikes. An agreement between Baghdad and Erbil in October 2020 to normalize the administration there has largely not been carried out, and emigration continues.
Is Yazidism really one of the world's oldest religions?
Partly. The claim appears constantly in journalism and in Yazidi self-description, and the honest version is narrower. Yazidism as an organized religion, with its own offices, calendar, hymns and shrine, took shape between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries around Sheikh Adi and the valley of Lalish. Several of its ideas, including reincarnation and the reverence for the sun and the elements, descend from much older Iranian religion. Figures of four thousand or six thousand years, common in popular articles, have nothing behind them.
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Related topics: yazidi religion, yazidi beliefs, melek taus, yazidism explained, yazidi persecution, lalish, yazidi practices
