Sombre Yazidis mark new year
Celebration muted in wake of atrocities
LALISH, IRAQ // Thousands of Yazidis flocked to a shrine in northern Iraq to mark the new year yesterday, in their biggest gathering since they became victims of mass murder by ISIL.
Wearing traditional clothes, holding candles and paraffin lamps, they began gathering in the holy town of Lalish the day before in preparation.
The event, known by the ethno-religious minority as “Carsama Sari Sali”, is meant to commemorate the creation of the universe by the angels and celebrate nature and fertility. But the mood was sombre among the faithful, every one of whom was affected by the violence that erupted nearly three years ago when ISIL took over their traditional homeland.
“I’m not happy because there are those still in the hands of Daesh,” said Zoan Msaid, a woman from the Sinjar area who now lives in a camp for displaced people. “I just want those who are still held to come back, that’s all.”
Yazidis are neither Arab nor Muslim. In what the United Na- tions qualified as genocide, ISIL carried out massacres against them in northern Iraq in 2014. Most of the several hundred thousand members of the minority live in northern Iraq, around Sinjar , where ISIL fanatics took Yazidi women and turned them into sex slaves to be sold and exchanged across their self-proclaimed caliphate. About 3,000 of them are believed to still be in captivity.
“After three years under the domination of the jihadists who killed Yazidis and imposed mass slavery, nothing is like before because we are all suffering,” said Cheir Ibrahim Keshto, an expert in Yazidi culture. “We live in sorrow and the situation in the camps is catastrophic.”
Yazda, a charity supporting Yazidi victims of persecution, urged the community to continue defending its belief system.
Even areas that were retaken from ISIL remained unsafe for Yazidis. Tensions have escalated between peshmerga forces and forces from Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party, creating conditions that Yazda said could be “more dangerous than the ongoing genocide itself”.