The Yazidi—Religion, Culture and Trauma

The Yazidi are Kurdish speakers who have lived for centuries as farmers and cattle breeders, scattered about in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and the former Soviet Union. They shared the same fate as the Kurds when the areas were Islamized in the 7th century. Most of the Kurds were forced to convert to Islam. The Yazidi live predominantly in present day northern Iraq. Their number worldwide is estimated to be in the region of 800,000 to 1,000,000 (Cetorelli et al., 2017). The troops of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” conquered 2014 the areas of northern Iraq and turned on the long-established religious minorities in the area with tremendous brutality, especially towards the Yazidi. Huge numbers of men were executed; thousands upon thousands of women and children were abducted and wilfully subjected to sexual violence. The religious minority was to be eliminated and the will of the victims broken. The future of Yazidism is unclear, but it will certainly never be the same again.