Yesterday, Tuesday, a German court considered that the Yazidis were subjected to “genocide” at the hands of the Islamic State, after it invaded large parts of north and northwest Iraq in 2014.

The Yazidis are an ethnic and religious minority that was concentrated in Mount Sinjar in the Nineveh Governorate in northern Iraq, and ISIS elements attacked it that year, killing hundreds of its men and children, kidnapping its women and taking them as captives.

Lalish Temple, the seat of the Spiritual Council of the Yazidi religion in the world, and the Yazidis make pilgrimage to it once in a lifetime (Al-Jazeera)

ancient religion

The Yazidi faith arose in Iran more than 4,000 years ago, and differs from other religions in that it is closed, non-missionary and does not accept new adherence to it, except for those born to a Yazidi father and mother.

It has a closed internal class system of marriage, where there are 6 different marriage classes in the Yezidis, each one intermarries with each other, and it is not permissible for her to marry outside her class, and those classes are: Adani, Shamsaniya, Qatani, Abyaar Hassan Maman, and the rest of the 39 breeds of Abyaar, and the devotees.

The Yazidis do not have a prophet or messenger like other religions, and in them man is directly connected to his Lord, and there is no collective prayer in their rituals. Rather, the Yazidis pray alone in a secluded place, facing the movement of the sun in its rising and setting, and they see that they are “from the offspring of Adam only without Eve.”

The Yazidis believe in one God, and they pray to him by taking the sun as their qiblah, in addition to their belief in 7 angels, the first and most important of whom is King Tawus. "Peacock Malak" - according to the Yazidi religion - is considered one of the 3003 names of God, and it is one of the signs of divinity, and "Peacock Malak" once takes the role of the sky god "Papa Deaus" for the ancient Iranians, and "Anu" for the Sumerians, and "Varuna". For Hindus, the sun disk is the same, and that is why the Yazidis revere the sun until now. And if "Malek Peacock" is an object of worship for the Yezidis, then the sun is an object of sanctification for them. As for their aversion to the word "Satan", it came as a result of boycotting the curse only, as the Yazidi researcher and historian Khalil Jundi tells Al Jazeera.

A soldier explains to Al-Jazeera Net the reasons why the Yazidis do not have a Bible, by saying: The Yazidis had two holy books: the first in the name of "The Mus-haf of Rash" (the Black Book), and the second in the name of "Al-Jalwa", but they were lost in the abyss of exterminations that the Yazidis were subjected to.

The Yazidis do not have a prophet or messenger like other religions, and man is directly related to his Lord in his relationship with him (Reuters)

The Yezidis speak the Kurdish language, and depend mostly - on agriculture - and the majority of them reside in Sinjar.

The Lalish Temple is the holiest of their religious places, and is topped by a conical stone dome, as well as several shrines in the middle of a mountainous area that includes natural springs in northwestern Iraq, and barefoot believers visit it.

They belong to the Supreme Spiritual Council, which consists of 5 members, and is located near the Sheikhan area in the Nineveh Governorate in northern Iraq, and among them is the "Emir" of the Yazidis in the world, in addition to their religious reference, Baba Sheikh.

The Yezidis are divided into 3 classes: the sheikhs, the pir (preachers) and the devotees, and it is not possible to intermarry between one class and another or from outside the sect, and it is considered a Yezidi only who was born to Yezidi parents.

Over time, the Yazidis have incorporated elements from other religions into their faith.

For example, children are baptized in holy water to celebrate their entry into the faith, like Christians, and men can take 4 wives, like Muslims.

There are many historical accounts about the history of the existence of their religion, as some believe that the Yazidis and their religion existed thousands of years ago, while other accounts say that they emerged from the ancient Babylonian religion in Mesopotamia.

The term "Yazidism" comes from the word "Yazdan", which means "worshippers of God who walk on the right path."

Some researchers argue that the Yazidis are from the ancient Indo-Iranian religions, before the Zoroastrian religion, which is historically known as the fertility religions whose philosophy and rituals are linked to nature and to the discovery of agriculture and the beginning of urbanization, with clear imprints of the ancient Mesopotamian religions such as Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Mitanni.

Yazidis say they were subjected to 74 "genocides" (Reuters)

 Yazidis in numbers

Of the approximately 1.5 million Yazidis in the world, the largest number - 550,000 - live in Iraq, with smaller numbers in the Kurdish-speaking regions of Turkey and Syria.

Decades of emigration resulted in large numbers of Yazidis heading to Europe, especially Germany, which is home to about 150,000 members of this sect, in addition to Sweden, France, Belgium and Russia.

But since the Islamic State swept Sinjar in 2014, nearly 100,000 Yazidis have emigrated from Iraq to Europe, the United States, Australia and Canada.

About 360,000 people are still living today in camps for the displaced in northwestern Iraq.

Only a few thousand have been able to return to Sinjar, where most homes remain in ruins, and electricity, clean water and hospitals are scarce.

The Yazidis are classified as the most vulnerable minority in the Middle East.

The Yazidis say that they were subjected to 74 "genocides", including the ISIS attack in 2014. The worst of those genocides - according to the Supreme Spiritual Council - witnessed the killing of 250 thousand Yazidis hundreds of years ago.

The Islamic State took control of Sinjar, northwest Iraq, in August 2014, and launched an attack on the Yazidis that amounted to a "potential genocide," according to the United Nations.

A German court on Tuesday sentenced an Iraqi ISIS supporter to prison on charges of "genocide" against the Yazidis (European)

The world's first referee

Yesterday, Tuesday, the German judiciary sentenced an Iraqi ISIS member to life imprisonment, after being convicted of “genocide” against the Yazidis, in a ruling that is the first of its kind in the world.

Frankfurt court judges considered Taha al-Jumaili, 29, "guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity that led to death, war crimes and complicity in war crimes."

Al-Jumaili was convicted of letting a five-year-old Yazidi girl die of thirst in the hot sun in the summer of 2015 in Fallujah, in Anbar Governorate, western Iraq, after he "bought" her with her mother, "Kasbeya".

According to the statistics of the General Directorate of Yazidi Affairs in the Ministry of Endowments of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, about 1,280 Yazidis were killed, more than 2,300 children were orphaned, and nearly 70 shrines were destroyed during the period of ISIS control over large areas in Iraq between 2014 and 2017.

Yazidi women fleeing Sinjar after ISIS took control of the town in 2014 (Reuters)

The organization also kidnapped more than 6,400 Yazidis, most of them women and girls, of whom about 3,400 people survived.

Since the organization lost its last pockets in Syria in March 2020, dozens of Yazidi women, girls and boys have been liberated and reunited with their families in Iraq.

The rest are still missing.

More than 70 mass graves were discovered in Sinjar containing the remains of ISIS victims, and the remains of dozens of victims were exhumed from 12 of them as part of a joint investigation led by the United Nations.

In addition, some women who were forced to give birth by ISIS fighters left their children in neighboring Syria, as a condition for their acceptance back into the sect.