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7 Kurdish Yazidis killed west of Mosul
18.12.2007
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December
18, 2007
Mosul, Northwestern
Iraq, --
Seven Kurdish Yazidis were killed and two others
wounded in an attack by unidentified gunmen on a
house west of Mosul, the mayor of Sinjar district
said on Tuesday.
"The attack took place during a late hour on Monday
night in a village lying between the districts of
Sinjar and al-Biaaj, west of Mosul. The gunmen used
machine-guns in the attack and all the victims were
men," Dakhil Qassem Hassoun said.
Mosul, the capital of Ninewa, is 402 km north of
Baghdad.
In August,
four suicide truck bombs
detonated simultaneously in the small village of
Qahataniya in
northwest Iraq outside
Kurdistan region,
near the Iraqi border
Kurdish town of Sinjar, killing more than 500
Yazidis, a devastating blow to a community of no
more than 500,000 people..
In the immediate aftermath of the bombings,
Kurdistan regional president
Massoud Barzani dispatched
a force of
400 Kurdish militia
(Kurdistan national forces),www.ekurd.net
known as peshmerga, to
Sinjar to protect the Yazidis — a provocative move
considering his official jurisdiction does not
extend to those lands.
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution states that
there will be a referendum in the areas bordering
the Kurdistan autonomous region, including the
northern oil city of Kirkuk, so that people can
choose whether to be ruled by the central government
or the Kurds.
Kurdish Yazidis look to
Kurdistan region, the Kurdish Yazidis
are concentrated in key areas for the referendum,
including lands coveted by the Kurds north of Mosul
and around Sinjar on the Syrian border. The Kurds
see the referendum as a chance to right Saddam
Hussein's historic wrongs of forced population
transfer and Arabization. The Arabs see it as a
Kurdish land grab.
"We hope that the land now lived on by the Yazidis
will join the Kurdish area," the community's leader,
Amir Tahseen Beg, told the Associated Press from his
residence in Sheikhan. "This will depend on the
referendum, but our areas must return to the
original motherland."
Sinjar, 120 km northwest of Mosul, is inhabited by
Kurdish Yazidis, a religious minority whose
followers are generally situated in northern Iraq.
Some 350,000 Yazidis live in villages in the Kurdish
areas around Mosul.
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 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 Duhok in Kurdistan region.
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 | AP
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