A WEB OF TRUTHS, half-truths, myths and outright lies surrounds the Yezidi of northern Iraq. It hardly seems necessary though, for the truth about this tiny ethnic and religious minority is strange enough not to need embellishment: They won’t wear the color blue. They don’t eat lettuce. They kidnap their wives. Many of them believe the American invaders are fulfilling an ancient prophecy that a blue-eyed man will come from the West to free them from oppression.

This small ethnic community, numbering perhaps 500,000 people in Iraq, 750,000 at most, is all that remains of what is perhaps the oldest monotheistic religion in the world, the Yezidi religion, a faith documented (at least sparsely) as far back as 2000 BC and according to oral tradition is vastly older still. Today, the Yezidi regard Muhammad as a prophet and Jesus Christ as an angel in human form. Some scholars believe elements of the Yezidi religion date to ancient Assyrian and Zoroastrian religions.

The Yezidi story of creation begins much the same as that taught to any Muslim, Christian or Jewish child. God created the angels from light (or fire). Later, He created the earth and then made Adam, the first man, from mud (or clay). The angels were told to serve as intermediaries, but one rebelled. This is where the stories diverge. For the followers of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths, God then banished the now ‘fallen angel’ from heaven. We call him Satan, Shaitan, Lucifer or, more commonly, the Devil.

In the Yezidi faith, God asked the angel why he disobeyed. The angel replied that he could not bow before anyone but God himself. God was pleased and made him the chief of all angels. They call him Azaziel or Al-Malek Al-Tawwus — the Peacock Angel.

This fundamental difference has led them to be mislabeled as devil worshippers by their neighbors, but in point of fact there is no such thing as a devil in the Yezidi faith, let alone Heaven or Hell.

“We believe Adam was a Yezidi,” Sabah, a Yezidi interpreter from Sinjar announces. “We believe our religion was handed down from God to the very first man and has been directly passed on to us.”

Yezidism is an ethnicity and a religious identity rolled into one. You cannot marry into or convert to the faith, due in large part to a unique (in this region) aspect of their beliefs, reincarnation, which they call the “soul changing its clothes.”

“You will keep going to different bodies until you get your soul right,” Sabah explains. “If you are bad, your soul will go to a crazy person or a blind person, even a dog.” Followers of the faith believe that everyone, Yezidi or not, is born at the time, in the place and practicing the faith ordained for them by God. This includes your status in the religion itself.

Yezidis are divided into castes. The higher caste, called Sheikhs, is further divided into community and religious leaders called Pir. The lower caste is the rest of the Yezidi population, called the Marid. Intermarriage between the castes is discouraged. “You cannot do this, you are born as God wants,” Sabah declares.”To keep our culture intact, we must keep the levels within it intact.”

Adherence to these principles varies from village to village, though. Another Yezidi man from Sinjar, who asked not to be identified as he works with Coalition Forces, confides, “It’s discouraged, yes, but it is allowable.” He goes on to describe a friend of his who was a Pir and had married a Marid girl. “Both of their parents were against it, but he ‘kidnapped’ her and in the end they accepted it.” (More on the whole notion of kidnapping in lieu of marriage proposal in a moment.)

Kim Piper A Yezidi boy in Tal Khaseb plays with a football given to him by the Coalition Forces.

Elsewhere, however, the penalty for this perceived denial of God’s will is ostracism — and for someone from a closed society, distrusted and persecuted by the other groups in the region, banishment is an extremely harsh punishment.

Kidnapping wives is an ancient tradition for the Yezidi. Sometimes it is used by young lovers to force their families’ approval, but more often it is simply a part of the marriage ceremony. A man from the village of Jazeera recalls how he kidnapped his wife: “Everyone knew, of course. I had paid the dowry the week before. The families got together and we agreed on a date,” he pauses to chuckle, then continues. “They left the window open that night and me and my wife ‘hid’ for one week at my friend’s house, then we came home and had the wedding ceremony.”

Unlike marriage between castes, marriage outside the faith is not simply discouraged, it is forbidden outright. The traditional punishment for this transgression is death. The practice is still widely followed in more rural areas, although it is rarely seen near larger towns. “In Sinjar, it used to be killing,” Sabah reveals. “But now we just kick them out. Here we gave it up because of so much persecution. The Yezidi shouldn’t kill the Yezidi.”

Sheikh Hamad, a Pir from the outlying villages closer to the mountains, has a different explanation: “The people here are poor and ignorant,” he says, referring to the Yezidi’s long history of economic and educational marginalization. “Many of them still practice the old ways. And, yes, they still practice the old rule of death for leaving the faith.”

In 1918, at the end of the First World War, the triumphant Allied forces divided the spoils. During the four-year course of the conflict, the world had irrevocably changed. Absolute monarchy was gone forever from Europe. Eighteen million people were dead. And four empires, the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman, were gone forever. The defeated Ottoman Empire was carved up into areas called ‘mandates’ as the Sykes-Picot agreement, negotiated back in November 1915 between the victorious English and French governments, arbitrarily drew lines across the Middle East to divide their new lands.

Ottoman provinces were lumped together in an almost random fashion, with border lines often being drawn with a ruler to make the lines neat and clean. The governorates of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra became known as Al-Iraq, meaning a grazing area, a reference to the fertile lands (or “Fertile Crescent”) between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Though at times this entire area had been united under the control of one empire or another, there was no common identity. Ethnically, religiously and culturally, the disparate groups now expected to call themselves “Iraqi” had little to nothing in common.

The minorities of the new country found themselves in the middle of a tug of war as larger groups began trying to absorb them to increase their power bases. Of the three Iraqi provinces, the Mosul governorate was easily the most diverse. Kurds, Turkmen, Chaldeans, Yezidi and various Arab tribes all called the region home. The discovery of vast oil reserves in the 1920s led to a struggle to secure the region for one or another of the various groups.

The struggle has gone through many incarnations and continues today.

The Nineveh province of northern Iraq is a study in contrast. The Jazeera Desert gives way to green mountains, forests and huge lakes. Mosul, the largest city in the province, is a modern metropolis. Highways and overpasses tower over blocks of office buildings that would look at home in New York or London. The foundations for many of these structures may date back to the fifth century BC, when Mosul was first constructed on the ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh. A highway running southwest out of town passes by what remains of the fortified city of Hatra, built by the Greeks in the third century BC.

A closer look at downtown Mosul suggests that it may have more in common with the ruins of the ancients than seems likely at first glance. Office buildings pockmarked by small arms fire and shrapnel tell of violence just as surely as the rubble of Hatra does. The closer you get to the policeman on the corner, the better you can see the mask he wears to hide his identity out of fear for his and his family’s lives. The vacant lot he’s standing next to also changes up close. Trash and rubble lie next to the blackened crater that means the owner of this building did not intend for it to come down just yet.

The peoples of this province are as varied as the landscape. It was a crossroad of civilizations as an important stopping point on the caravan routes linking India, Persia and the Mediterranean states. The Turkmen from central Asia and Arab tribes from far off to the south mingled with the local Kurds and the remnants of the fallen Chaldean empire. The mix was not always peaceful — and not always sought by the local residents. The rubble of destruction past and present tells the stories of peoples and cultures battling for supremacy. The latest of these battles was a push by Saddam Hussein and the Baath regime to secure the area by pushing out the indigenous peoples; it has become known as Arabization.

Some of these various ethnic groups are small enough that they have rarely even been heard of outside the Nineveh province. One such people are the Yezidi. Another are the Chaldeans.

A Chaldean man in the Zohour neighborhood of Mosul stops an American foot patrol as it goes past his house, which was nearly destroyed the previous week when Coalition Forces had trapped a group of insurgents who had taken refuge there.

“The insurgents ran here because we are Christians,” he explains angrily. “They never run into houses in their own neighborhoods.” Inside the house is an old woman. “My mother,” he introduces her with an exasperated look. “When the problems started, my brothers and I sent her to New Zealand.” His brothers live in New Zealand and were able to secure her a visa. “Can you imagine how I felt when she came back?”

It is obvious from the guilty look on her face that they have had this discussion before. She strokes the cross around her neck and offers her oft-repeated apology, “I had to come back, I miss Iraq, Iraq is my home.” And Iraq is not just her home, it is the home of her people.

The historical city of Nineveh upon whose ruins modern Mosul was built was the capital of the ancient Chaldean empire. The Chaldeans boast a distinguished lineage. Abraham of Ur, whom Muslims, Christians and Jews all consider the father of their faiths, was, according to the Bible, a Chaldean. Ethnically, the Chaldeans are a non-Arab, Semitic people whose daily language is Aramaic, which they proudly claim was the language of Christ. This Christian community is among the oldest in the world, and archaeologists have dated churches in the area back to the second century AD.

The Chaldeans strongly supported the Allied forces during the First World War. The British invasion of what is now Iraq and the formation of Chaldean militias called levies prompted harsh retaliation from the Turks. The Armenian genocide and subsequent slaughters as far away as northern Iran killed an estimated two-thirds of the Chaldean population. The levies survived and were an integral part of the British forces in the area, a disastrous relationship for them after the British left.

Kim Piper A young Yezidi mother plays with her child.

In 1920, the government of King Faisal nominally took control of Iraq. This inaugurated a period of Sunni-Arab minority rule that lasted until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein 83 years later. Twelve years after he ascended to the throne, Faisal died and the English departed. Left without allies, the Chaldeans were nearly defenseless. The levies that had been used to suppress nationalist and anti-British uprisings were universally disliked in Iraq.

On August 7, 1933, some 3,000 Chaldeans were killed by Iraqi militias, ably assisted by the local population.

As far as the central government in Baghdad was concerned, there was only one problem with Northern Iraq and its vast oil reserves and massive tracts of arable land: the people who lived there. Governing as a minority, the Sunni-Arab-dominated Baath Party that later produced Saddam Hussein constantly questioned the loyalty of the region’s inhabitants.

In the 1970s, even before Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979, the Baathists began forcibly removing the minorities from the north. To consolidate their control they replaced the indigenous population with loyalist tribes from the Jazeera Desert. Landless and living in tents in the extremely arid Jazeera, it took little to convince the tribesmen to move north.

Kim Piper The aftermath of a suicide bombing in Tal Afar.

It was bad news for the Chaldeans, worse for the Yezidi.

“The government came to us and told us to go live there in the north,” Sheikh Nawwaf Al-Shummari told workers from the NGO Human Rights Watch. “They said they would give us lands, just to protect the oil fields.” Previous to this, the Sunni Arab Shummar tribe had been living in the desert, moving often to find water. The government promised them irrigated land in 1974, and the Shummar, like hundreds of thousands of other tribesmen, eagerly left the harsh desert life behind. (The Shummar tribe has strong ties to the Saudi royal family. The first Saudi king married a woman from the Shummar tribe to cement a peace accord on the Kingdom’s northern border. Similarly, the present King Abdullah’s wife and mother are both Shummari.)

Yet not everyone was so eager. An Arab farmer who settled in the formerly Yezidi area of Sheikhhan told the same NGO, “We moved because there was an order from the government to move to this village. Whether I was happy or unhappy, I had to obey that order. During the last regime, if the government gave an order to the people to do something, they had to obey.”

The district of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq is home to the largest concentration of Yezidis. The Sinjar Mountains, from which the region derives its name, is the Yezidis’ ancestral homeland and one of their holiest places. The Chermera (literally meaning “40 Men” in the Yezidi dialect) temple on the highest peak is so old that no one remembers how it came to have that name.

The Sinjar Mountains roughly divide the desert from the arable land to the north. The northern slope looks as if a giant had carved himself a set of steps leading up to the summit. Today, the steps, long ago leveled off to create new farmland, stand abandoned and in disrepair: In the early 1970s, the Baath Party began forcibly removing the Yezidi from the mountains.

Most were relocated in barren patches of desert nearby.

“The year I was born is when they came to take our land and my family’s home,” says a man from the settlement of Tal Khaseb. Although he looks to be in his 30s, he refuses to give his age and speaks only on condition he not be named. “At first [after the fall of the Baath regime] we tried to kick them [the Arabs who were given their land] out like they had done to us. But then the army [Coalition Forces] came, and we had to stop.”

Everyone here has a similar story.

Tal Khaseb is virtually indistinguishable from dozens of settlements in which the Yezidi now live — single-story mud brick houses piled together in seemingly random order on stretches of land unwanted by anyone else.

Looking around the nearby village of Jazeera, one has to wonder why anyone would settle here. The surrounding landscape is barren to the point of lunar. The new, nearly completed modern village school is three stories tall, two stories more than any other building in town and the only structure in Jazeera with indoor plumbing. Standing on the roof, the only living things as far as the eye can see are people and a scattering of livestock.

The answer to why someone would choose to live here is simple: They didn’t.

Mishan Sirhan guards the new school, a job he accepted just one month before we arrived in town. His pay is barely enough to feed his family, but he’s extremely grateful for the work. Exact figures for unemployment in this area are impossible to obtain, but estimates range as high as 90 percent. Seasonal farming accounts for most of the available work here. After the rainy season, they travel to the more fertile land on the northern side of the mountains hoping to grow enough staples to see themselves and their livestock through another year. A bad harvest spells disaster.

“I came from Al-Hyali,” says Sirhan. “After they moved all the people, they destroyed everything.” The town Al-Hyali cannot be found on any map made after the early 1970s, but since the fall of Saddam’s regime, many people have been returning to their ancestral lands. Sirhan, however, has no plans to go back. “There is nothing to return to,” he says simply. “We have lived here for 35 years, this is our home now. People wouldn’t talk of leaving if we could find work here.”

Joining the KDP (the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two major Kurdish political parties) to get into the Kurdish militias, which make up a significant portion of the Iraqi Army, is the most assured work the young men can find. It’s no surprise, then, that there are practically no men in the village aged 18–30.

The job, however, comes with a price.

“Ten years ago, there were less than 750,000 Yezidi in Iraq,” one Yezidi man in Tal Khaseb declares. “Now, there are more than a million of us in Iraq alone.” His figures are more than a bit on the high side: Most estimates peg the number of Yezidi at half that figure. But in a nation of only 26 million citizens (pre-invasion), that’s still a significant portion of the population.

This is why the Yezidi ethnic identity has long been under attack. Under the Baath regime, they were counted as ethnic Arabs to challenge Kurdish claims to the northern region. Under the new Iraqi government, the powerful Kurdish parties have refused to recognize the Yezidi as a group with a separate identity, claiming them as their own to bolster the numbers of the Kurdish population.

And oddly enough, the Kurdish claim is not entirely baseless: The Yezidi speak a dialect of Kurdish and they share a common ancestry. But as Sheikh Hamad puts it, “All Kurds were once Yezidi, but the Yezidi were never Kurds.”

The Kurds have no ban on intermarriage with other ethnicities and are overwhelmingly Sunni. To the Yezidi, this simply means that even if their ancestors were Yezidi, the modern Kurds are not.

Some among the Yezidi leadership were complicit in the reclassifications. Many feel that they’ve been bought and sold. As one Yezidi interpreter from Sinjar claims, “In 1975, the Baathists gave them money and they called themselves Arabs. Again in 1997, the PUK (the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the other major Kurdish party) came and paid them and now they say we are Kurds. What’s next? If the Jews or the Christians show up with money, will we go with them?”

Others claim it’s not quite that simple. “I had to join the Baath Party just to go to university,” Sabah reveals. The Baath Party never recognized the Yezidi, so he had to claim Arab ethnicity; Sabah says he simply played along to avoid persecution.

Then, in the final days of the old regime, a law was passed making it illegal for any child born in a state-run medical clinic to be given a Yezidi name. “Genocide is not just killing people,” Sabah explains. “You can destroy a people by destroying their identity, too.”

The Chaldeans tell a similar story: After Abraham, perhaps the best known Chaldean was Iraq’s former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz. Born Michael Yuhanna, he had to change his name and renounce his ethnicity to join the Baath Party.

By the 1970s it had become a crime to speak Aramaic in public. Still, they stood strong. So, having failed to eradicate the Chaldean identity, the Baathists decided to starve them out. After Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, crippling economic sanctions were imposed by the international community. In the 1990s, the United Nations Oil for Food Program was a staple for ordinary Iraqis. This necessary aid was denied to anyone who held on to their status as an ethnic Chaldean. Only those who redesignated themselves as Arab Christians were allowed to use the ration cards.

The same law that outlawed the speaking of Aramaic also outlawed Turkmen, the Turkish dialect spoken by northern Iraq’s largest minority. The banning of their language and the closure of their schools pushed illiteracy among Turkmen youth to epidemic proportions, guaranteeing their economic marginalization.

Most Yezidi holy sites are built on high ground. “The sky is very important to our religion,” says the caretaker of the Chermera temple on top of the Sinjar Mountains. “This is why we don’t wear blue; it is the color of the sky, so it is the color of God.” Which leads to another Yezidi tradition: “Yezidi do not urinate standing up,” he says. Then, after looking around nervously as if he has been giving away great secrets, he tells how they get as close to the ground as they can so as to defile as little air as possible.

Among the many other peculiarities of the Yezidi faith is the Wednesday Sabbath. A difficult tradition to explain, as the Yezidi believe that the first day of Creation was a Sunday.

Inside the temple are small shelves built into the whitewashed walls. Every Wednesday, the animal grease stored on these shelves is taken out to light special lanterns, the only artificial light allowed inside the temple. Brightly colored pieces of cloth hang off the ceiling. The strips of fabric are misshapen from tiny knots tied along their edges.

Khaled, a local Yezidi who assigned himself as our interpreter, stops briefly to tie a knot and then whispers the explanation: “The knot is a kind of a prayer. But it is a special prayer; it is to ask God to grant you something.” (The Yezidi faith, my photographer and I have by now learned, emphasizes a personal relationship with God.)

Every shrine and temple has a special day. For Chermera, it comes in mid-spring. Khaled claims the shrine on the highest peak of the Sinjar Mountains is tied to the resurrection of Christ. They believe God sent Al-Malek Al-Tawwus, the head of the angels, to move the stone that blocked Christ’s grave. He claims the angel stayed here at the site of the temple.

Nature is also very important to the Yezidi. Khaled explains this as another reason they gather here to worship in mid-spring, “After mid-spring, the world begins to die again. Everything is born and then it begins its journey to death.”

The Iraq of the 1980s was scarred by the border war with Iran. For eight full years, the frontier became a vicious battlezone. When the cease-fire was signed in 1988, an estimated one to two million people had lost their lives.

Yezidi in the area whose ethnicity had survived the Arabization campaigns of the 1970s were forced during the Iran-Iraq war into ‘volunteer’ military units like the Popular Army. These units, with inferior equipment and training, suffered much higher casualty rates than their regular army counterparts. Thrown together with little regard for the consequences, all ethnicities and religions found themselves fighting not just the enemy, but also each other.

“My uncle was an officer during the Iran war,” Sabah says. “He was killed by friendly fire.” Asked for proof, he said he had spoken with other members of the unit who told him there was no fighting that day. In fact, he says, they weren’t even very close to the border.

During the last year of the Iranian war, with the peace nearly guaranteed, Saddam Hussein turned his attention back to his own people. In 1988, he ordered his cousin, Ali Hassan Al-Majid, to begin the Anfal campaign. Between 100,000 and 180,000 Kurds, Yezidi, Chaldeans and Turkmen disappeared into thin air. They turned up in mass graves uncovered following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The overtly genocidal nature of the Anfal campaign sets it apart from previous Arabization programs. But the result for the survivors was no different: They were driven out, their lands were given away, and those who were left behind lived in constant fear.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to tracking down historical facts about the Yezidi is that they have no scriptures. They say their holy books have been destroyed in the centuries of campaigns waged against them. Copies of their holiest book, the Mus’haf Rish (literally: “The Black Book”) remained in their hands until the time of the British mandate after the First World War, most say. It was supposedly at that time that British anthropologists spirited the last of the Mus’haf Rish away to a museum. The location of the museum is subject to much speculation. England, some say, though others claim it is in mainland Europe. Others still declare the last of their holy books is in a museum somewhere in America.

Many claim to have proof of where the Mus’haf Rish is. None are willing to produce it.

The lack of a written historical record makes it necessary to trace Yezidi history through the records left by other ancient civilizations. The name Yezidi can be found in the Sumerian language and meant the ‘ones who are on the true path.’ References to them can also be found in Aramaic, and they were heavily (though not necessarily accurately) documented by the Islamic empires who ruled the region.

Misunderstandings about the Yezidi are widespread. Being a closed society that doesn’t believe in proselytizing, they have traditionally had no interest in educating their neighbors about themselves. The prohibition on mixing with outsiders isn’t simply on marriage: A Yezidi cannot use a spoon, drinking glass or even a comb that has belonged to an outsider.

This isolation has led them to be used as a regional bogeyman to scare bad children of other faiths and ethnicities. Many of those who have grown up on these myths find it hard to discard them later in life. Educated people in large urban centers such as Mosul swear to us that the Yezidi commonly burn women at the stake.

Their self-imposed isolation has at times been disastrous for the Yezidi. Sheikh Hamad explains how the harmless tradition of ‘kidnapping’ wives has been used against them: “In Sheikhhan, close to Dohuk, rumors started about the kidnapping.” Not understanding the consensual nature of the practice, nor the strict ban on outside marriage, local men began raiding Yezidi villages and fields for wives.

“Several villages were forced to move,” Sheikh Hamad recalls. “The Yezidi lost many of their daughters and all of their land there.”

Other misunderstandings have been exploited for the benefit of minority rule. Yezid bin Mo’awia is a hated name among the Shi’a. He was the Umayyad Caliph who killed Hussein, the grandson of Ali. Somehow, the rumor was started that the Yezidi were an errant Muslim sect which was founded by Yezid. The Yezidi are well documented long before the coming of Yezid bin Mo’awia, but some Shi’a who shun secular education remain unaware of this. While putting down the 1991 Shi’a uprising in the south, the Baathist army destroyed several mosques, then blamed the destruction on the Yezidi.

The city of Tal Afar was once a microcosm of the ethnically heterogeneous north. Amid the chaos following the recent collapse of the police force, the various groups formed militias to defend themselves. The thinly represented Yezidi fled to nearby communities in Sinjar. According to survivors, the Shi’a militias were killing any Yezidi they could find.

The mayor of Tal Khaseb, Mokhtar Madrees, announces they’ve already absorbed as many refugees from Tal Afar as they can handle. But it may not be over yet: “They’ve killed at least 100 Yezidi there [in Tal Afar] in the last two months,” he tells us.

Northern Iraq’s violent history continues. The vacuum left by the fall of the Baath regime and frustration at the (stalled at best, failed at worst) reconstruction have led to unprecedented violence in the area. The struggle to fill the void has turned the various groups against each other — and even against themselves.

Unlike other minorities, the Turkmen are not religiously cohesive. In some areas, they are split nearly in half by the Sunni-Shi’a divide. Much of the sectarian violence in Tal Afar was Turkmen against Turkmen. The destruction has reached incomprehensible proportions.

Lieutenant Colonel Armstrong, an American officer with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, stationed in Tal Afar, tells of one of the many suicide bombings his troops responded to. “When the Iraqi police managed to identify the bomber, they found out it was a young man from the neighborhood.” He continues in stunned disbelief, “The bomb went off less than 400 meters from the house this kid grew up in. Can you imagine? Less than 400 meters from his house.”

Not all of the discord has reached this level. The Yezidi are sharply divided on the best course for their future, but the divide remains political. The Yezidi Movement is the only party that is exclusive to them, but not everyone wants to stand alone. Others, mindful of the fate of the Chaldeans after British withdrawal and noting strong Yezidi support of the Coalition Forces, want stronger allies and have thrown their weight behind the powerful Kurdish parties.

The aftermath of the Arabization programs is phenomenal in scope. Human Rights Watch counted nearly 1 million displaced people living in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region alone. The hundreds of thousands of tribesmen who were ordered into the areas the displaced left now number in the millions, few of whom have any interest in returning to the harsh life of a desert nomad. Left unchecked, this situation has the possibility of spreading from Iraq to the rest of the region.

The ayatollahs of Iran openly claim dominion over all followers of the Shi’a sect and are already accused of supporting Shi’a Iraqi militias. And should the situation degenerate into an all-out civil war, the Turks have plainly stated that they would use any means necessary to keep an independent Kurdish state from coming into being.

The Joint Claims Commission in Mosul has the daunting task of assessing the mountains of land claims. Hindered by the continuing violence and funding problems, their work proceeds at a slow pace. The importance of their mission cannot be overstated: Their job is the peaceful resolution of decades or even centuries of ethnic violence.

The number of people affected and the bitterness involved offer a very clear warning to the Yezidi and the other peoples of northern Iraq: As bad as it is now, and as bad as it has been, things can still get very much worse. et