The Yazidis have been genocided 74 times. The 74th time we noticed.

Seventy-three times before August 2014, someone came for the Yazidis.

Seventy-three times over the course of roughly fourteen centuries, Islamic armies or militias or rulers arrived at the villages and mountains of northwestern Iraq and northern Syria with the same intention. They came for people who would not convert. People whose faith was too old, too strange, too stubbornly itself to be absorbed or tolerated. People who venerated an angel they called Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, and who kept their sacred books in a script so ancient it predated Arabic, and who did not eat lettuce, and who did not wear the color blue, and whose marriage customs and dietary laws and prayers were so thoroughly their own that no invading theology could find purchase in them.

Political Islam came seventy-three times. Massacre and forced conversion and enslavement and dispersal followed. The Yazidis have a word for these events. They call them fermans. The word comes from the Persian for royal decree. When a ferman came, the decree was simple: Conversion, enslavement, disappear or die.

Seventy-three times before ISIS, the world did not notice.

I want to sit with that number for a moment before we talk about the seventy-fourth time. Not because the seventy-fourth time was not horrific. It was. Not because the world’s belated attention was worthless. It was not. But because the number seventy-three is doing theological and historical work that gets lost the moment we jump to the news cycle. That number is not a coincidence. It is a pattern that spans more then just the history of the Yazidis, Armenians and Jews. And the pattern has a cause that the world’s belated attention still, in the case of the Yazidis a decade later, has not fully named.

Who the Yazidis Are

The Yazidis are an ancient religious community, indigenous to the Sinjar region of northwestern Iraq, with diaspora communities in Syria, Turkey, Armenia, and Germany. Their origins are debated among scholars, but the most credible accounts place Yazidism as a syncretic tradition drawing on pre-Islamic Kurdish folk religion, elements of Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, and, in its later form, Sufism. Their founder figure, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, was a twelfth-century Sufi saint whose tomb in the Lalish valley north of Mosul remains the holiest site in the Yazidi world.

The core of Yazidi theology resists Western religious categories, which is partly why it has been so consistently misunderstood. The Yazidis believe in a God who created the world and then entrusted its care to seven holy beings, the most important of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, whom God commanded to bow to no one but God himself and who refused to bow to Adam. In the Abrahamic traditions, a figure who refused God’s command to bow and was proud before Adam has a specific name and a specific fate. The identification of Melek Taus with Iblis, with Satan, was made by Muslim commentators centuries ago and it stuck. It was wrong. In Yazidi theology, Melek Taus’s refusal was not rebellion but fidelity. He bowed to no one but God because that was what God had asked him to do. He was not cast out. He was entrusted.

The misidentification had consequences that make most of the last fourteen centuries legible.

If the Yazidis worship Satan, then killing them is not genocide. It is piety. It is the elimination of an active spiritual pollution from the face of the earth. The theological framing transformed a vulnerable religious minority into a category of being whose destruction could be justified within the very framework that was doing the destroying. The fermans were not recognized as genocide because the perpetrators experienced them as religious obligation. How comforting.

This is worth naming clearly before we say another word about the seventy-fourth time.

The Shape of the Seventy-Three

The fermans began arriving in earnest in the seventeenth century, though earlier attacks on Yazidi communities are documented from the medieval period. The most thorough scholarly analysis counts at least seventy-three distinct large-scale attacks on Yazidi communities between the early Islamic period and 2014.

Several stand out in scale and deliberateness. Nadir Shah’s campaign in the eighteenth century specifically targeted Yazidi villages in the Sinjar region with mass killings, rape, torture, enslavement, and forced conversion. Ottoman governors conducted repeated campaigns against the Yazidi heartland in the nineteenth century, with organized massacres documented in 1832, 1837, 1892, and 1907. The 1892 campaign under Omar Wahab Pasha killed tens of thousands of Yazidis and destroyed the majority of their villages in the Sinjar, with mass killings, rape, torture, enslavement, and forced conversion. The 1907 campaign, conducted under the governor Fakhri Pasha, was documented by Western missionaries in the region who sent accounts to European capitals describing organized mass murder, rape, torture, enslavement, forced conversion, and the burning of villages while their inhabitants were still inside.

None of these produced a response from outside the region. There was no international law that applied. There was no institution with the standing or the will to intervene. There was not even, in most cases, a name in Western languages for what was happening. The word genocide would not be coined until 1944, by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer trying to describe what had been done to the Armenians and what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.

The Yazidis were being subjected to the thing the word was eventually invented to describe, and they were being subjected to it before the word existed and long after it should have applied.

The pattern of the fermans is consistent enough to constitute a methodology. They came when a new power consolidated authority and needed to demonstrate its religious legitimacy. They came when Yazidi communities had accumulated enough visible wealth to attract organized looting under religious cover. They came when religious authorities needed to demonstrate seriousness about the boundaries of the faith community and chose the Yazidis as the demonstration. They came, in other words, not because the Yazidis had done anything. The Islamasists came because the opportunity existed to follow the example, teaching, and commands of the bandit prophet. The unbelieving Yazidis existed, and because they were there, on land that someone else wanted, with a faith that Islam had classified as devil worship, in a state of perpetual vulnerability that generations of surviving fermans had deepened rather than resolved. Islam is the only religion that tries to control those who never chose it, has a death penalty for those who leave it. And the only religion that guarantees paradise to those who follow it, ONLY IF they die while trying to take the life of a non believer. These are uncomfortable facts, but true none the less. The middle east will never know peace while it clings to Islam. Because Islam demands war of those who follow it, until all follow Islam. The difficulty is, that to criticize something that Muhammad did, is to set your own standard of right and wrong higher then Muhammad’s standard. And if Allah endorsed that behavior of Muhammad… Then you are claiming that your standard is higher then Allah’s too. THAT is why these things keep happening. It is impossible to reform these practices (like wife beating) without the reformer claiming to have superior standards to Gods own. THAT is the impasse. What Muslim can criticize another Muslim for doing what the prophet did and Allah endorsed? And the cycle continues. The GOOD people we all know, who happen to claim to be Muslim, are not following the prophets example. They are bad at Islam. That is why they are such kind people.

August 2014

The Islamic State moved into the Sinjar region on August 3, 2014.

The Yazidi community had warning. Arab (kind Muslim) friends in neighboring communities had been calling in the days before, telling them something was coming, urging them to take their families and leave. They tried. The Kurdish security forces, the Peshmerga who had promised to protect them and had shamed them for even considering flight, turned them back at the entrances to their villages. We are here, the Peshmerga told them. You should feel ashamed for trying to flee while we are protecting you. Then, in the early hours of the morning as ISIS arrived, all Kurdish security personnel collectively withdrew from the Sinjar region in an organized, planned withdrawal. They left. The people they had shamed into staying were left to face what was coming.

On the morning of August 3rd, a ten-year-old girl named Faiza woke up to find her family frightened in a way she had not seen before. She asked what was happening. Within hours, ISIS militants had stopped at her village, separated the men, and led her father, grandfather, and uncles away in handcuffs. The last thing her father did before they took him was find her in the crowd and hold her hand. It’s okay, he told her. Don’t be scared. Then they put him in a room with the other men of the village, filmed them, and laughed.

After that day, Faiza later testified, I felt there was no one to protect me anymore.

What happened across the Sinjar region over the following days has been documented with unusual thoroughness. The men were separated from the women and children at checkpoints and in village squares. The older men and boys above a certain age were shot in mass graves. There are more than eighty documented mass grave sites in the Sinjar region. The women and girls were loaded onto trucks and transported to holding facilities in Mosul, Raqqa, and other ISIS-controlled cities. They were catalogued. They were sold.

ISIS published a price list.

A girl between one and nine years of age was priced at approximately $172. A woman between twenty and thirty was priced at approximately $86. Women over forty were priced at approximately $43. The document, published in the ISIS official magazine Dabiq, justified the enslavement in explicit theological terms. The Yazidis were mushrikeen, polytheists, a category of unbeliever that classical Islamic jurisprudence treats differently from the People of the Book. Jews and Christians, under the classical framework, could be offered the dhimmi arrangement, subordination and taxation in exchange for the right to continue practicing their religion. Polytheists, under the same classical framework, were offered conversion or the sword. The re-institution of slavery, Dabiq explained, was not an innovation. It was a restoration of prophetic practice abandoned under Western pressure. The 3 classes of people in an Islamic society are: mushrikeen (3rd class human chattel, no rights), dhimmi (2nd class, dominated peasants with some rights), and Muslims, 1st class citizens with full rights, (unless female).

The theological argument was not invented by ISIS. It was assembled from sources that predate ISIS by a thousand years. Under established Islamic jurisprudence. This was Shariah, and shariah cannot be separated from Islam. Shariah is the fruit of islam and the root cannot deny its fruit, the one produces the other.

More than two hundred thousand Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar. The mountain is steep. The day was hot. Elderly people could not make the climb. People with disabilities who couldn’t walk were left behind or left at the side of the mountain. There are photographs of young Yazidi men choosing which parent to carry because they could not carry both, and photographs of the parent who was left sitting on the side of the mountain to die while the child carried the other one to the top. There are photographs of men pushing parents in wheelbarrows up the mountain. Some people ate leaves to survive. Some mothers kept their infants alive using their own saliva. Some people committed suicide because they saw no way out. Children died. Many children died.

At the peak, two hundred thousand people waited with no food and no water, surrounded by ISIS on every approach, slowly dying in the summer heat. A German-based Iraqi Yazidi activist named Mesa Denai volunteered to join helicopter crews running supplies to the mountain, flying at two thousand meters because ISIS was shooting at them from below. One of the Soviet-era helicopters crashed on the mountain. Mesa survived with a broken leg and broken ribs. He went back to Iraq in a wheelchair. He eventually established a resettlement program in Germany, bringing 1,100 Yazidi women and children out.

One of the girls he rescued was a fifteen-year-old named Lamia who had been blinded by a landmine while escaping, her face disfigured. After surgery saved one of her eyes, she told Mesa: if you want, I would like to speak to the people and tell them about the crimes that ISIS did to my family and to our people. She shared the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize with Nadia Murad, another Yazidi survivor. At the ceremony she said the prize belonged to every woman and girl who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS.

Nadia herself was fifteen when ISIS attacked her village. They killed all the men, including her brother and father. They divided the younger girls and traded them on the slave market. She was sold four times. Every time she tried to escape. Every time she was caught. The last man who bought her was an Iraqi doctor who tortured her alongside two other women, one of whom was nine years old. All three were raped by this doctor. All three managed to escape. Before they reached safety, one of the women, Katherine, stepped on a landmine. The last thing Nadia heard was her death scream. Nadia survived. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. She used the acceptance speech to ask the world to hold ISIS accountable. The question of bringing them to justice, she noted, has barely raised a whisper.

An eighteen-year-old named Hala was sold three times. Each owner was worse than the previous one. She was raped, forced to recite the Quran, forcibly converted. She was beaten when she did not cook well enough or clean well enough. She was not allowed to leave, not allowed to speak to anyone, not allowed to use the phone. She contemplated suicide several times. After three years she threw herself into the crossfire of a battle between ISIS and Iraqi forces, screaming that she was a Yazidi girl, and surrendered to the Iraqi army. She was freed. To this day she has not heard from her mother, her father, or her three brothers.

What We Said and What We Did Not Say

The United States government formally recognized the ISIS campaign against the Yazidis as genocide in 2016. The European Parliament passed a resolution. The UN Commission of Inquiry used the word with full legal precision. The designation was correct and the people who worked to secure it did important work.

But there is a word adjacent to genocide that appeared in very few of the official designations and almost none of the press coverage. The word is doctrinal.

The ISIS campaign against the Yazidis was not genocide in the same way that the Holocaust was genocide, driven by racial pseudoscience with no religious sanction in the tradition of the perpetrators. It was genocide in the way that the Armenian massacres were genocide and the way that the Ottoman campaigns against the Assyrian Christians were genocide: driven by a theological framework that classified the target population as a category of being whose existence was a religious problem to be solved.

The ISIS document in Dabiq did not invent its argument. It cited sources. The classification of Yazidis as mushrikeen who fall outside the dhimmi protection is the standard position in classical Sunni jurisprudence. The permissibility of enslaving captives taken in jihad is documented in the hadith collections and developed in the major schools of Islamic law. The specific provision permitting sexual use of female captives is in Sahih al-Bukhari, in the commentary of Ibn Kathir, in Ibn Qudama’s al-Mughni. ISIS did not write new theology. It read old theology and decided to implement it.

This does not mean that mainstream Muslim scholarship endorses what ISIS did. It does not, officially. The vast majority of Muslim scholars condemned the ISIS campaign, many with genuine horror and moral seriousness. Condemning the application but not the validity of the doctrine or the Islamic teachings that call for the violence. Speaking out both sides of their mouths. One side saying its necessary and the other side saying its evil. A necessary evil.

But condemning the application while refusing to examine the source material that made the application possible is a form of intellectual evasion that the Yazidis in the mass graves cannot afford on the world’s behalf.

The question the seventy-fourth ferman demands is not only: why did ISIS do this? The question is why seventy-four distinct organized campaigns to destroy the Yazidis have occurred over fourteen centuries, all perpetrated by actors operating within an Islamic theological framework, all using the same doctrinal justification, the Yazidis as devil-worshippers outside the protection of any religious law, and none of them ever repudiated by that framework from within with sufficient authority to prevent the next one.

The Number the World Needs to Hold

The condemnations came from outside the tradition or from reformist voices within it who do not control the authoritative texts. The authoritative texts remain what they are. They were old before ISIS read them and they will be old after ISIS is gone.

Reforming the theological classification that produced seventy-four fermans would require authoritative voices within the tradition to say, publicly and with the weight of institutional standing, that the classical jurisprudence on mushrikeen was wrong, that the Yazidis are not devil-worshippers, that the enslavement of captives taken in jihad is not a valid religious practice and never was, that the price list in Dabiq was not a legitimate application of prophetic example but a desecration of it. Some Muslim voices have said versions of this. They have not said it with the institutional authority that the tradition vests in its classical sources. And the classical sources have not changed.

The United States government formally designated what happened as genocide. Both the Obama and Trump administrations applied the word. This is noted with appropriate credit. But as testimony from someone present at the State Department reveals, the same US government had earlier deliberately refused requests for air strikes because it wanted political pressure to mount against the Iraqi prime minister. The calculation was geopolitical. The consequence was the beginning of the genocide. Both of these things are true simultaneously. They are the specific texture of how the world tends to respond to the elimination of small, ancient, inconvenient minorities in places that do not have sufficient strategic value to override the calculation.

There are still over eighty ISIS mass graves of Yazidis to be exhumed. Approximately 2,700 women and children taken in August 2014 have still not been recovered. Each number in that figure is a woman or a girl with a name in a language that has been spoken in the Sinjar mountains since before Arabic existed. Each one has a family still looking. Many are believed to be held in a detainment camp in eastern Syria called Al-Hol, held there with their captors. We have, as testimony describes it, abandoned the victims with their victimizers in this camp and thrown away the key.

The people who have the luxury of treating the formal acknowledgment as sufficient are the people who were not in the Sinjar when the seventy-fourth ferman arrived.

Faiza went home to her village in Sinjar nine years after she fled it. She walked the street where she grew up, walked into the house where her family used to eat together and wait for her when she came home from school and play in the backyard. She stood in the room where she and her siblings used to sleep together, wake up together, laugh together. Now it was just four walls. Empty. Fifteen family members had lived in that house. Now it was her, her brothers, and her mother. We used to play in the backyard, she said. Now it’s been nine years. I haven’t seen any of them. Now it’s just this room. Just four walls. Empty.

Her father has been missing for nine years. She does not know whether he is alive or dead. There are eighty ISIS mass graves still to be exhumed. She does not know if his remains are in one of them. She does not know if she will ever be able to give him a proper burial.

The last thing he did before they took him away in handcuffs was find her in the crowd and hold her hand. It’s okay, he told her. Don’t be scared.

She is still waiting to find out if that was true.

Seventy-Four

The people reading this understand what it means to count. They understand what it means to be an ancient minority targeted for elimination by larger forces that justified the targeting in theological terms. They understand what it means to survive the previous attempt and face the next one. They understand what it means to have the word genocide applied to what happened while the search for the missing goes underfunded and the perpetrators go unaccountable.

The Yazidis are not Jews. Their faith is different, their history different, their geography different. But the machinery that produced seventy-four fermans is the same machinery that has been applied to Jewish communities in every country where Islamic political authority has had sufficient power to implement it. The same theology. The same legal classification of the non-Muslim as subordinate, subject to elimination when the political conditions permit. The same world watching and calculating and arriving late with airdrops.

The seventy-fourth ferman ended. The seventy-fifth has not been declared yet. That is not the same as safety. For people who have counted to seventy-four, the absence of an active ferman is not peace. It is the interval between fermans. It always has been.

Until the source material that makes the fermans theologically possible is repudiated from within the tradition that produced it, with the same authority and permanence that the tradition claims for itself, the Yazidis will keep counting.

And the world will keep noticing only when the number gets large enough and the images get graphic enough and the coverage gets sustained enough that looking away becomes temporarily impossible.

And then the world will move on again.

And the Yazidis will be left with their dead and their missing and their number, still climbing, in a valley in northwestern Iraq where their temples have stood since before any of the traditions that keep trying to destroy them were born.

When it comes to Islam, WE are all Israel. The Yazidi are one of the best examples. Whether they realize it or not.