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Kurdish Yazidis live among reminders of
deadly attack
4.10.2007
By Ivan Watson
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October
4, 2007
Mosul, Kurdish Yazidis area in northwestern
Iraq, --
More than a month has passed
since
four suicide bombers
driving trucks filled with explosives attacked two
Kurdish villages in northwest Iraq - killing 310
Kurds and wounding more than 700.
The targets were poor Kurds from the Yazidi
religious sect, which Iraqi insurgent groups have
vowed to annihilate. The attack, on Aug. 14, was the
deadliest insurgent attack following the U.S.-led
liberation of Iraq.
Since the August truck bombings, the administration
in Iraqi Kurdistan has dug trench-like
fortifications around the Kurdish Yazidi villages in
the desert town of Sinjar. They have also deployed
an additional
600 Kurdish forces
Peshmerga to protect the villagers.
But those measures have done little to alleviate the
fears among the Yazidis, a long-persecuted religious
minority of some 600,000 people.
Haunting Reminders of the Attack
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Hamdiye Samer and her 5-year-old daughter, Hamo, now
live in a tent with 10 other people. Samer was in
the yard, calling her children home, when a bomb
exploded. Her husband died in the blast, and Samer
was hit in the chest with shrapnel. NPR photo |
In the devastated Yazidi village of Tel Azer, a
crude mannequin serves as a haunting reminder of the
massacre there.
A toddler's T-shirt and small hood hang on a wooden
frame, erected in the ruins of one of the 800 homes
that were flattened by the four truck bombs.
A few miles away, on a street that looks as if it
were hit by an earthquake, Khokhay Suleyman squats
in the dirt, pounding at the rubble of her house
with a hammer.
"We're homeless," she mumbles. "Everything's gone,
nothing's left."
Suleyman and the other survivors are still reeling
from the attack. Aid is only slowly trickling in,
partly because the victims live in an isolated
Kurdish-controlled enclave near Sinjar.
Traveling to the Village
The town is surrounded by Arab districts where
Iraq's insurgents hold sway. The safest way for
Kurdish or Iraqi government convoys to get there is
by a long road that's just a stone's throw from the
border with Syria.
On one journey into the town, a five-car convoy
travels along a road that runs parallel to the
Syrian border. Kurdish gunmen in a pickup lead the
convoy, and they are nervous. They keep their
fingers on their gun triggers, afraid of becoming
the target of a roadside bomb or an insurgent
ambush.
A Kurdish guard, Khalif Seyder, points out craters
and burnt-out cars from previous roadside bombs. He
cocks his gun and aims it out the window when the
convoy enters the Arab border town of Rhabiye.
"This is the headquarters of the terrorists," Seyder
says. "[In] this village, they are all terrorists."
Recalling the Attack
As a long-persecuted religious minority, Yazidis
live in fear of future attacks.
Their spiritual leader is a bearded, 74-year-old
cleric named Baba Sheikh.
"If they continue attacking us like that [and] if
they repeat these attacks two or three more times,
they will finish us," Sheikh says.
Twenty-year-old Khudayda Khalid was playing soccer
with his brothers when the first bomb went off the
day of the insurgent attack. He sprinted home, but
he couldn't find his house, because it had been
flattened.
"Luckily, I could recognize the bodies of my family
members; otherwise, I could not have recognized my
house," Khalid says.
Khalid lost his mother, father and 18 other
relatives that day.
Government Relief, but No Reconstruction
Today, packs of stray dogs run through the vacant,
dirt field that used to be the center of Tel Azer.
Authorities filled in the crater [left by the
bombs], but the blast also damaged houses
three-quarters of a mile away.
Now some residents, like 85-year-old Gawre Halaf,
live in government-supplied tents on the edge of the
village. Halaf, who is still recovering from
shrapnel wounds to her shoulder, says she won't last
more than 10 days. She's old and sick, and the
winter is coming.
"I'm sure [that] I won't survive," she says.
The Iraqi government paid compensation to many of
the village's survivors and distributed some food
and mattresses. No money, though, has been given for
reconstruction. Some villagers say they have gone
more than a month without electricity.
A visiting Yazidi lawmaker from Kurdistan, Mariam
Baba Sheikh, expresses outrage at the government's
response.
"No one did anything, I know — not the central
government, not the Kurdistan government," Sheikh
says.
The Yazidi religion teaches its followers that, over
the centuries, there have been 72 campaigns by
outsiders to wipe out the group.
In keeping with Yazidi oral traditions, singers have
composed new, haunting ballads. They're trying to
remember the most recent attempt to destroy their
ancient community.
npr org
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