The followers of the Peacock Angel believe they are facing their 73rd genocide. Many are already scattered across the corners of the earth, more are fleeing for their lives from their latest persecutors, and some are dying of thirst on a scorching desert mountainside. The Yazidis have run out of places to call home.
It is not often you can record the moment when an ancient religion’s home is finally wiped out. But this week might mark that moment for the Yazidis, one of the most colourful bands of worshippers in the Middle East.
More than all other inhabitants of the fragmented violent mess that is modern Iraq they had reason to fear the jihadists of the Islamic State, who term them devil worshippers. They thought they were safe in an enclave in the north of the country, where they were protected by Kurdish forces, even when Islamic State’s Toyota truck-mounted warriors came sweeping through Iraq from the south-west.
But then a second wave attacked, and overwhelmed their biggest town, Sinjar, driving them out and into the desert. About 100,000 are thought to have made it to camps and other places of refuge further north, inside the Kurdish Autonomous Region itself. But thousands more — estimates range from 10,000 to 40,000 people — are now surrounded in the fierce July heat of the Iraqi desert, all exit routes cut off.
But no one will be able to say it could not have been foreseen. The more prejudiced of their Sunni Muslim neighbours always despised the Yazidis, using them as bogeymen to frighten their children. There is reason for their association with devil worshippers, though hardly a good one. The semi-deity worshipped by the Yazidis, known as Malek Tawwus, or the Peacock Angel, can easily be identified with Satan — the Peacock Angel, like Lucifer, fell from grace but in the Yazidis’ eyes was pardoned and restored to glory. To the Yazidis’ enemies, Malek Tawwus really is Satan, and if you are a jihadist of the Islamic State variety, that means they can be killed with impunity. The threats have already been circulating on jihadi Internet forums.
The truth, of course, is somewhat different. While many in the Middle East see Yazidism as a breakaway sect from Islam or Christianity, it is in fact an entirely separate, pre-existing religion with its own belief system. Yazidis do not believe in heaven or hell, but in reincarnation, which they call the soul “changing its clothes”. Their religious practices certainly mark them out. They never wear the colour blue. They are not allowed to eat lettuce. Many of the men wear their hair in long plaits that make them resemble nothing so much as Asterix and Obelix, while others keep wildly thick, untrimmed moustaches.
They practise a form of institutionalised elopement, where a man must “kidnap” his bride with her own consent, but without her parents’ knowledge. They believe one of their holy books, the Black Book, was stolen by the British in colonial times and is kept somewhere in London. While the origins of their beliefs are shrouded in mystery, they have kept their religion alive through the Talkers — Yazidi men who are taught the entire text of the missing book by heart as children and pass it on to their own sons in turn. Far from being devil worshippers, they find even the mention of the word ‘Satan’ so profoundly offensive that Iraqis used to warn visitors to their villages in the Sinjar region not to say it.
Less mysterious is the history of persecution to which they have been subject. It is not just for religion; ethnically Kurdish, they are a minority within a minority, in a tough region. In Turkey, they were once forced to carry identity cards that listed their religion as ‘XXX’, as if it was too unspeakable even to write, until almost the entire community fled to Europe. In Georgia and Armenia, they were forced out by nationalist movements after the fall of the Soviet Union, while in Syria most fled religious persecution.
In Iraq alone they survived, though their situation has been precarious, particularly since the rise of Sunni extremist groups in the region around them during Iraq’s civil war.
Now there are fears for their continued existence in their homelands. “We are calling for the outside world to send military assistance,” says Telim Tolan of Denge Ezidiyan, a Yazidi expat organisation in Germany. “If help doesn’t come soon, I’m not afraid a genocide will start, I’m afraid it will already be finished.”
The question now, for the first time, is whether even Kurdistan is safe. In recent years, the Kurdistan Autonomous Region, as it became, has been a beacon of prosperity and stability, ruled over by two clans, the Talabanis and Barzanis, in a quasi-democratic system, both more or less friendly to both the West and Iran. Their defence forces, the Peshmerga, had a reputation for being the only efficient fighters in the country. Even they, though, have proved less of a match for Islamic State than promised. Ironically, despite being friends with the West and recipients of much western investment, the Peshmerga have not been supplied with the West’s weaponry, which must go through Iraq’s central government in Baghdad. The central government naturally does not like the Kurds’ undisguised ambition for independence.
Will Kurdistan be a new ‘red line’ for Washington? There is no sign it will be. The Christians, with their history and western ties, the Yazidis with their Peacock Angel — none of these have been a red line. The Kurds may have to defend themselves. One hopes they will do better than they did for Iraq’s frightened minorities.