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Kurdish Yazidis won't celebrate top
festivity for security reasons
7.10.2007
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October
7, 2007
Mosul, Kurdish Yazidis area in northwestern
Iraq, --
The
Yazidis will not celebrate their top festivity,
which will start today, and will have it exclusive
to religious ceremonies like the case during the
past three years out of security concerns, a
spokesman said.
"The step is aimed at lessening security risks after
Iraq's Yazidi religious Kurdish minority came two
months ago
under attacks
considered the most violent in the country since
2003," Papa Sheikh, the chief of the Supreme
Spiritual Council for Yazidi Religion in Northern
Iraq, said.
"Due to the Sinjar incidents and the disaster that
befell the Yazidi sect, there will be no kind of
celebration of al-Jamaaiya Day, our top festivity,
which will start on Sunday and continue for four
days," said Sheikh.
Four truck bombs were detonated in mid-August 2007
in Kar Izir area, 35 km south of Sinjar, and at the
Siba Sheikh Khidr housing compound, leaving at least
800 people killed or wounded.
Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, an Iraqi interior
ministry spokesman, said there were three suicide
trucks carrying two tons of explosives. At least 30
houses and other buildings were destroyed.
Sinjar, 120 km northwest of Mosul, is inhabited by
Yazidis, a religious minority whose followers are
generally situated in northern Iraq. Some 350,000
Yazidis live in villages around Mosul, 402 km north
of Baghdad.
The Yazidi faith is not a missionary religion. Its
followers are concentrated in northern Iraq.
According to the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR),
there are about 800,000 Kurdish Yazidis all over the
world. 550,000 of them live in Iraq and concentrated
in the district of Sinjar, where the temple Lalesh
is considered the holiest shrine for Yazidis, the
district of al-Shaykhan (50 km north of Mosul), the
district of Bueshiqa (15 km east of Mosul) and some
other areas and villages in the provinces of Ninewa
and Kurdistani Duhok.
Yazidis are primarily ethnic Kurds and most live
near Mosul, with smaller communities in Armenia,
Georgia, Iran, Russia, Syria, and Turkey. The
estimates of their population size vary, partially
due to the Yazidi tradition of secrecy about their
religious beliefs.
Yazidis worship seven angels, in the form of
peacocks, who are subordinate to the supreme god who
created the universe.
A couple of related incidents in the spring
highlighted the tensions between Sunnis and Yazidis.
In April 2007, a Kurdish Yazidi teenage girl was
brutally beaten, kicked and
stoned to death
in northern Iraq by other Yazidis in what
authorities said was an "honor killing" after she
was seen with a Sunni Muslim man. Although she had
not married him or converted, her attackers believed
she had.
The Yazidis condemn mixing with people of another
faith.
A U.S. military official said the Sunni al-Qaeda
Organization in Iraq sent members of the Yazidi
religious minority threatening letters, called
"night letters," telling them "to leave because they
are infidels."
VOI
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