In an article first published on The Conversation, GÜNEŞ MURAT TEZCÜR, author of ‘Liminal Minorities’, looks at the historic marginalisation and discrimination of the Yazidis in Iraq…
On the morning of 3rd August, 2014, the Islamic State group launched a ruthless and swift campaign in Sinjar, in north-western Iraq. The target was Yazidis: a monotheistic religious group whose members have long been persecuted.
As forces affiliated with the regional Kurdish government fled in disarray, IS fighters captured and enslaved an estimated 6,800 Yazidis, mostly women and children. About 1,500 Yazidis were executed. A similar number lost their lives from excessive heat, thirst or starvation while stranded on Mount Sinjar, before US airstrikes several days later enabled escape to the relative safety of Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq.
Displaced Iraqi women from the minority Yazidi sect, who fled the Iraqi town of Sinjar, walk at the Khanki camp on the outskirts of Dohuk province, on 31st July, 2019. PICTURE: Reuters/Ari Jalal.
The entire Yazidi population of Sinjar, about 250,000 people, lost their homes: around half of all Yazidis across the globe, by my estimate.
Ten years later, it is easy to look back on the massacres as the work of extremist militants. But IS in Iraq recruited heavily among local Sunni Muslims from north-western Iraq. People who lived alongside Yazidis for many years became their tormentors, rapists, looters and killers.
“The Yazidi experience reflects a global pattern: a type of marginalisation and discrimination against faith groups whom I call ‘liminal minorities’.”
What explains the ferocity of this genocidal campaign? As a scholar of political violence and Middle East politics, I argue that two main factors led to the anti-Yazidi atrocities.
First, Muslim authorities have historically stigmatised Yazidis and denied their existence as a faith group – one of the focuses of my 2024 book, Liminal Minorities. Second, transformations after the US invasion of Iraq fuelled resentment, which extremists channeled against this marginalised religious group.
A global pattern
The Yazidi experience reflects a global pattern: a type of marginalisation and discrimination against faith groups whom I call “liminal minorities”.
Liminal minorities have two core characteristics. First, they lack theological recognition in the eyes of the area’s dominant religion. In other words, more powerful faith groups do not acknowledge the legitimacy of their religion and denigrate the minority’s beliefs and rituals.
Second, liminal minorities are subjected to widespread stigma transmitted across generations. They are often perceived as a threat to moral order and at times alleged to engage in sexually deviant practices. These patterns of stigmatisation beget discrimination.
In addition to Yazidis, liminal minorities include Alevis in Turkey, Baha’is in Iran, and Ahmadis in Indonesia and Pakistan. Religious liminality is not exclusive to the Muslim world: For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses in a variety of countries and Falun Gong in China are also liminal minorities.
Centuries of prejudice
Yazidis’ marginal status is not new. Under the Ottoman Empire, Christian and Jewish communities were offered a limited degree of protection and autonomy in return for paying a special tax – known as the millet system. These groups were recognised as “People of the Book”: monotheists whose religious faith was accepted by Muslim authorities. Yazidis, however, lacked this status.
Even today, Yazidis are often insulted as “devil worshippers.” According to the Yazidi faith, God entrusted the world to his lead angel, Tawûsî Melek, which means “Peacock Angel“. Some Muslim religious authorities, however, conflate this angel with Iblis, the personal name of the devil in Islam.
This misidentification gained widespread acceptance among Muslim clerics by the 16th century. Under Ottoman rulers and Kurdish tribal leaders, the claim was used to justify extreme forms of violence against Yazidis, including mass enslavement and killings.
Political resentment post-Saddam
The stigmatisation of Yazidis remained widespread in Iraq throughout the late 20th century. There were no large-scale episodes of religiously motivated massacres targeting Yazidis under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Yet many were forced out of their mountain villages as part of his party’s Arabisation campaigns: forced deportations aimed at weakening non-Arab minorities in the country’s north.
Iraq is home to people of both major schools of Islam – Sunni and Shiite – as well as minority faiths such as Yazidis, Christians and Sabaean-Mandaeans, who follow an ancient monotheistic religion. The country is also home to many different ethnic groups, with a large Arab majority and sizable minorities of Kurds, Turkmens and Assyrians.
Sunni Arabs, who make up a minority of the population, formed the backbone of the Saddam regime, while Shiite Arabs and Sunni Kurds were mostly excluded from power. After the US invasion, however, the Shiite majority was able to dominate electoral politics, and many Sunni Arabs complained of being marginalised.
The Kurdish region, meanwhile, consolidated its autonomy. Yazidi votes become crucial to Kurdish claims for additional territory – spurring more Sunni resentment of the Yazidis.
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Boiling point
My fieldwork, including extensive interviews between 2017 and 2019, suggests that the Islamic State’s goal of ethnic cleansing capitalised on these feelings of resentment and aimed to undermine Kurdish territorial claims.
Hundreds of Yazidis became victims of violent attacks well before 2014. As the Islamic State group gained power, it further intensified anti-Yazidi stigmas. The group instructed fighters that extreme forms of violence, including systematic rape, were justified by their faith.
The combination of historical hatreds, political resentment and denying the legitimacy of Yazidis’ faith helped spark the violence that devastated Iraq’s Yazidi community in 2014.
Quest for recognition and security
In the wake of the genocide carried out by IS, the Yazidis received unprecedented international attention as a persecuted faith group, and several countries, such as Germany, created resettlement programs for Yazidi refugees. Yazidis in the diaspora became more visible and organised, demanding justice and aiming to mobilise public attention.
Nevertheless, their conditions remain dire. Yazidis are unable to return to Sinjar, which is still an insecure zone contested among rival armed forces. Many remain in camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, facing an uncertain future.
Others have sought refuge abroad, and some benefited from specialised humanitarian asylum programs like Germany’s. The country has been home to part of the Yazidi diaspora since the early 1970s and emerged as a major destination for Yazidis fleeing Iraq after 2014. Today, about 200,000 Yazidis are estimated to live there.
Yet the rise of anti-immigration sentiments in Europe has made the Yazidis’ situation similar to that of many other migrants and refugees. As public attention to the genocide begins to fade, these newcomers face an increasingly inhospitable political climate.
Facing an existential precarity in their homeland and legal limbo in the diaspora, the Yazidi liminality persists.
Güneş Murat Tezcür is the director of the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
