Islamic Extremists Pose New Risks for Religious Minorities in Iraq

The incursion of Islamic extremists in Nineveh province, in northern Iraq, is bad for a lot of people, but perhaps no group has more to lose than a minority religious group known as the Yazidis.

The deeply misunderstood sect is one of the most vulnerable groups in Iraq today. Saddled with the dual problem of being primarily ethnically Kurdish and religiously distinct, the group’s territory, in northern Nineveh, hovers dangerously close to the areas recently overtaken by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

Yazidis practice an ancient religion derived from Zoroastrianism. A central figure in the religion is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, whose story of falling out of grace with God resembles that of Satan’s in Islam. All of this has earned the Yazidis the inaccurate – and in today’s circumstances, life-threatening – stereotype of being so-called devil worshippers.

“Everyone considers us infidels,” said Samir Babasheikh, whose father, Baba Sheikh, is the Yazidis’ spiritual leader. “Sunnis and Shiites are killing each other even though they are both Muslims, so imagine what they will do to us, people from a completely different religion.”

Fear of violent attacks, or more mundane repression, by ISIS is common among members of minority faiths in Iraq, including Christians, who also run the risk of being targeted.

The Yazidis are painfully familiar with the brutality of Islamist fundamentalist groups like ISIS, having suffered at their hands long before their rise to infamy last week. In 2007, an ISIS predecessor issued a fatwa — a religious decree — ordering followers to kill Yazidis. Later that year, multiple coordinated truck bombs went off in Yazidi areas, killing more than 500 people and wounding 1,500. This massacre came after a series of smaller scale attacks claimed by jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda, who had repeatedly denounced the Yazidis as infidels.

For the past several years, Baba Sheikh, the Yazidis’ spiritual leader, tells me he has canceled the official yearly religious ceremony at Lalesh temple, the holy site of the Yazidis, out of fear of attacks.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism more broadly has pushed thousands of Yazidis to seek asylum in Europe. According to some estimates, 70,000 people, or about 15 percent of the Yazidi population in Iraq, fled the country. For a religion that does not accept converts and strongly discourages exogamy, the assimilation of Yazidi youth in Europe threatens the faith’s continued existence. “People have gone out of fear of attacks or fear of racism. This makes it hard to protect the faith,” said Baba Sheikh.

Nawzad Hassan Narmo, a representative of a Kurdish political party in Alqosh, an area north of Mosul inhabited mostly by Yazidis and Assyrian Christians, said he already feels less secure. Nawzad’s cousin, Saddam Narmo and the four other passengers he was with – one Christian and three other Yazidis – went missing. For the past week, Nawzad has been receiving threatening phone calls from a man who claims to be the kidnapper and has repeatedly demanded a hefty ransom of close to $300,000 for Saddam and the three other Yazidi hostages.

“He calls me many times a day. For example, he will call me at 2:30 am, and say ‘if you don’t pay now, we will execute them all tomorrow morning at 8:00 am.’ Then he calls again at 9:00 am, and says that they postponed the execution until the afternoon, giving us a chance to pay them again. But he will not allow me to speak to any of them,” Nawzad said, “How can I turn over this money without knowing if they are alive?”

The kidnapping is a sign of the broader danger that religious minorities, including Christians, will face should ISIS gain control of Iraq. Panic is widespread in Nineveh province these days, as many refugees flee northwards out of fear of ISIS, the Iraqi army, or both. Mosul’s religious minorities now face one of the most serious existential threats in their long histories.