Ten years after the ISIS attack… Why do the Yazidis of Iraq still feel threatened?

Ten years have passed since the genocide of the Yazidis by ISIS, hundreds of conferences have been held and thousands of articles have been written, but societal ignorance of the Yazidi religion and misinformation about its adherents are still widespread, which provokes hostile attitudes towards them and rejection of their rituals, which in turn creates hate speech that represents a source of danger to peaceful coexistence in Iraq.

The accusation of “devil worship” and the claim of following the Umayyad Caliph Yazid bin Muawiyah is part of the false information that is spreading about the Yazidi religion in Iraqi society. The Yazidis consider this ignorance of their religion and the promotion of hatred, and they demand that it be stopped, to prevent it from being used again by “terrorist” organizations such as “ISIS” to justify their violence against them. They stress that their religion is “monotheistic and non-missionary.” Civil activist Navin Samouqi (30 years old) says that when she identifies herself as a “Yazidi” from Sinjar, she hears the same phrases or questions repeatedly: “Do the Yazidis really worship the devil?” and “Are they followers of Yazid bin Muawiyah?” This is part of the false information that is spreading about the Yazidi religion in Iraqi society. Samouqi considers the promotion of such ideas to be a marketing of the idea of ​​social ostracism of the Yazidis and thus exposing them and their religion to hate speech. Therefore, she demands that those who exploit social media to spread these “lies” about her religion be held accountable.

Samoqi gives an example of this, when an Arab influencer posted videos of his visit a few months ago to the Lalish Temple, the holiest Yazidi religious center in Iraq, describing the place as a “temple for devil worshipers.” She said: “This description prompted dozens of his followers to post offensive comments and writings about Yazidi followers, and in the end, false information that some may consider facts.”

 The Lalish Temple is located in the Sheikhan area, 47 km north of Mosul, the center of Nineveh Governorate, and is the main temple for Yazidi followers in Iraq, where various annual religious events are held.

Samoqi continued: “That videos spread false information during about the temple, and his mader not bother to ask any of the place’s servants, or of the Yazidi visitors there, or members of the Yazidi Spiritual Council”.

Yazidis believe in one God and seven angels, and they are spread across the Nineveh and Dohuk governorates in northern Iraq, and their numbers in Iraq are estimated at about half a million people, in addition to about one and a half million distributed among the countries of the world after many of them settled in Germany and Azerbaijan. The majority of Yazidis around the world speak the Kurdish language, except those who live in northeastern Mosul, and all the instructions of the Yazidi religion are in Kurdish language.

Yazidi activist Sirwan Fandi (27 years old) also spoke about being exposed to negative situations due to perceptions that people have toke it based on false information, indicating that this causes him psychological harm, but despite that he continues to “fight misinformation and confront anyone who promotes it.”

Fandi warns that “the failure of Iraqi educational and cultural institutions to fulfill their duty in introducing the different religions in the country, and the lack of a curriculum in primary schools to teach the beliefs of different religious and sectarian groups, in light of the social gap resulting from decades of sectarian conflicts, have contributed to maintaining confusion about some religions such as Yazidism, Kakai, Mandaeism, and others.” Fandi points out that this is what prompted many civil activists and journalists from different religions to take on this task by engaging in awareness campaigns “and they joined their Yazidi colleagues in confronting a lot of misinformation and working to correct it.”

Devil Worship

According to Yazidi activist Nasr Khader, Yazidism is a “monotheistic religion that believes in God, angels, and the doomsday,” but it differs in the way of worship, and the essence remains “worshiping God Almighty.”

It is worth noting that the first text in the Yazidi prayer emphasizes the oneness of God, and its translation into Arabic is “God is One, He has no partner or friend, God is manifested in His oneness,” and the Yazidi name for “God” is “Khuda,” which means “He who created himself by himself,” and this is “the pinnacle of monotheism embodied in the Yazidi religion,” according to Khader.

He added: “The researchers who wrote about Yazidism in the second half of the twentieth century, most of whom were Arabs, did not live among Yazidis and were unable to communicate deeply with the closed followers of this religion, who in turn remained closed in on themselves until the end of the twentieth century,” adding that these researchers “caused, through their superficial writings, to distort the Yazidi religion, especially with regard to their position on Satan.” Yazidi mythology states that God ordered the angels to prostrate to Adam in order to test them, after he had taken a covenant from them not to prostrate to anyone other than him, so they all prostrated except for “Taoos King” who refused to prostrate to anyone other than God, so he passed the test and became the closest of creatures to God. This makes him a central figure in the Yazidi religion. This story, according to researchers, led some followers of other religions and sects to consider “Taoos King” to be Satan himself, and on that basis the Yazidis were described as “devil worshippers,” despite their rejection and denial of this, as they do not believe in the existence of an evil being like Satan and believe that evil comes from man himself.

Khader says that although the accusation of “devil worship” has been directed at the Yazidis since ancient times, it was promoted more widely in the 1970s during the rule of the Baath Party regime, and “was renewed and returned to the forefront by terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and then ISIS to justify the actions of these criminal organizations against the Yazidis, including killing, kidnapping, and others.” The Yazidi activist adds that raising these accusations and marketing them in the media succeeded in influencing a number of “unconscious” youth, who were swept up by ISIS and before it Al-Qaeda, who exploited them in “serving extremist ideas, so they carried out widespread killings against the Yazidis, driven by a strong hate speech.”

On August 3, 2024, ISIS carried out a large-scale attack on the Yazidi areas in Sinjar district in Nineveh province, killing 1,293 Yazidis, most of them men, and kidnapping 6,417 Yazidis, including 3,548 women. The fate of about 2,700, most of them women, remains unknown to this day. Between 2005 and 2010, Al-Qaeda also carried out repeated attacks on Yazidis in Nineveh province, killing hundreds, such as the truck bombings in the Qahtaniyah district of Sinjar on August 14, 2007, which killed 796 Yazidis and wounded 1,562 others. The United Nations considered it at the time “the most violent and largest attack targeting civilians in Iraq.”

Khader Domli, a researcher in minority affairs and an academic at the University of Duhok in the Kurdistan Region, said in an interview that Yazidism is one of the oldest religions in Mesopotamia and that its existence has been present for more than two thousand years. He added that “the name ‘Yazidi’ means ‘worshipper of God’ in Kurdish, and this is evidence of the oneness of the religion. It comes from the word ‘Azdai’ – who created me – and ‘Yazidi’ means who created himself. It is evidence of the Yazidi’s direct allegiance to God in their religion.”

Time gap

On the other hand, false information is spreading about the connection of the Yazidi religion to the Umayyad Caliph Yazid bin Muawiyah bin Abi Sufyan, which Khader settles by saying: “Yazidism has no relation to Caliph Yazid bin Muawiyah,” indicating that this fallacy appeared as a result of the similarity of the words between “Yazidism” and the pronunciation of the Caliph’s name “Yazid” and nothing more.

Domli presents another evidence of this, which is that there is a large time gap between the history of the Yazidi religion, which dates back to 2000 years BC, and the Umayyad Caliph Yazid, who ruled in the seventh century AD.

He also confirms that through this large time gap it becomes clear that the Yazidi religion has no relation to the Umayyad Caliph, and that the connection between them aims to start hostility between the Yazidis on the one hand and Muslims, especially the Shiites among them, and on the other hand the issue “does not go beyond the linguistic similarity between the terms.”

Yazid bin Muawiyah bin Abi Sufyan, the second Umayyad Caliph, died in 683 AD, and is a controversial historical figure because his reign witnessed the killing of Hussein bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the siege of Mecca by his army and the catapulting of the Kaaba. In turn, Dr. Ali Al-Nashmi, a professor of history at Al-Mustansiriya University, confirms that Yazidism is a “monotheistic” religion whose roots extend back to the ancient civilizations of the Mesopotamia before Christ, and was distinguished by its influence from ancient religions such as Zoroastrianism, then Christianity and Islam, reiterating that there is no connection between it and Yazid bin Muawiyah.

Strict law preventing hatred

Regarding the reasons for the spread of this misinformation, Domli explains that many writers cannot delve into the Yazidi religious philosophy and culture, as it is written, inherited and circulated in the Kurdish Kurmanji language, and therefore they were and still are relying on easily accessible Arabic sources, most of which convey inaccurate images and definitions, and are copied from each other without delving into them and updating the information contained therein, which includes many errors and fallacies, according to his expression.

Domli continues: “Some malicious people are also trying to stir up strife among the Yazidis and those around them from different communities, by broadcasting hate speech that includes fabricated information and by republishing lies from time to time according to political or religious agendas.”

Accordingly, Domli demands the enactment of a strict law to punish and hold accountable anyone who promotes misinformation with the intention of spreading hatred and division among followers of religions, sects and religious schools in Iraq, stressing that “respecting and protecting freedom of belief and religious diversity is one of the duties of state institutions.”

Changing the curriculum

Educational teacher Ayoub Hassan believes that confronting hate speech, division and discrimination can only succeed through the educational institution, and he called for a national campaign to change the curricula in the primary and intermediate stages to ensure that students receive accurate information about different religions away from sectarian tendencies.

Hassan, who has fifteen years of experience in teaching, says that “the genocide that happened to the Yazidis in 2014 at the hands of ISIS elements and the widespread killings before that should represent a social and national lesson, as all of this happened based on false information that was marketed for decades about the Yazidi religion, and was stirred up over the years by a hate speech against the different other.”

He points out that the hundreds of conferences held on the Yazidis and the thousands of articles written “did not change many of the prevailing concepts, as societal ignorance of the Yazidi religion is still great, and this provokes hostile attitudes towards them that ultimately threaten the fragile peaceful coexistence in the country.” Yazidi Kamel Hasso, who lives as a displaced person in a camp on the outskirts of the city of Zakho near the Turkish border, asks with resentment: “Were all those genocides and the mass graves scattered in Sinjar for victims of religious violence not enough to explain who the Yazidis are, end discrimination and hate speech, and turn the page on the past?” The young man, who completed his university education four years ago and currently works in the construction field, expresses his belief that the story of the Yazidi displacement that has been ongoing for ten years to internal camps will end with their eternal migration to foreign countries “as long as the state remains unable to stop hate speech based on ignorance of the beliefs and rituals of others.”