This week will mark three years since the Islamic State overran Sinjar and kidnapped more than 6,000 people. The town in northern Iraq is the ancestral homeland of a religious minority group called the Yazidis
Polytheism and the Islamic State
The Yazidis revere both the Bible and the Koran, but much of their own tradition is oral, according to the BBC. The religion of the Yazidis revolves around the worship of a single God, who created seven sacred angels
These beliefs led the IS to label the Yazidis as polytheists, a perilous category in Islamic doctrine—especially so in the Salafi-jihadist group’s interpretation. According to a reporter from The Guardian who reported from Sinjar, the Arabic letter Y was scrawled on buildings to alert IS to Yazidi property
Not a territorial conquest
Just two months after the IS captured Mosul, the jihadists set their sights on Sinjar. Initially it appeared as though the advance on the town was just another attempt to extend IS territory. But there were signs that their aim this time was different, wrote the New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi in 2015
‘They came to rape’
“What became clear to me is that IS invasion of Sinjar was not a territorial conquest. It was a sexual conquest. They came to rape,” she tweeted Thursday. Once the IS captured Sinjar, the men and boys were killed. The women and girls were later subjected to sexual slavery by the jihadists, who justified it using Islamic doctrine
‘Devil worship’
Taus Malik is one of the seven angels worshipped by the Yazidis. “He (IS jihadist) said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us,” a woman who escaped the IS told the Times