You probably heard the story over the weekend about an incident of the Occupation in which a bus carrying Iraqis was stopped. The passengers were described as "Christians and members of an Iraqi religious minority", and the kidnappers separated them thusly. Then the "religious minority" folks were shot and the Christians were let go.

The dispute turns out to be based more on a "West Side Story" sort of incident involving the marriage of a girl from the minority in question to a Sunni man. But Juan Cole today gives us the background on this "religious minority" group and it is both fascinating and deeply sad. Did anyone in the US government know anything about these people before we went charging in there to impose our view of society on them?

Cole's post is long and discusses many things--including why the wall-building project was deeply idiotic--but I want to pick out here just the story of the Yezidi-Kurdish people. As an intermittent Wiccan myself I am sympathetic to any group whose opponents claim they are "devil worshippers." Which, in case you don't read the jump, they aren't. I've added the links Cole provided for further background:

The word Yezidi comes from the ancient Iranian Izad, a word meaning "God," and is related to the Persian "yazdani," meaning "divine." The religion is a survival of ancient Iranian beliefs and motifs shaped by a Muslim social context. Thus, the 7 angels they revere are probably originally 7 Indo-European gods. The chief angel, Melek Ta'us ("King Peacock"), is said to have extinguished the fires of hell with his tears, so that Yezidis do not believe in hell and are universalists. There are Zoroastrian influences on their beliefs and rituals, though these may actually derive from a common Indo-Iranian ancestry. It is not true, as some outsiders have alleged, that Yezidis are devil worshippers. They believe Melek Ta'us was a good angel, not satan. For a blogger's encounter with Iraqi Yezidis, see this site.

Indo-European peoples called Parsumash immigrated into what is now Iran and Iraq from about the 800s BC, according to the Assyrian clay tablets. These were probably tribal predecessors of the Medes and the Persians. The Kurds are linguistic and cultural heirs of these ancient Iranians, whose mythology was similar to what is in the Vedas. Most Kurds converted to Islam, but some retain older religious ideas.

This incident demonstrates that if the Iraqi conflict escalates (yes, it still can get worse), the Kurds may well get drawn in, willy nilly.

This is really Chicago Dyke's territory and I hope she will drop by to provide other helpful sources of information on this matter. The survival of what are sometimes disparagingly called "little sects" like this over the range of time noted is at least as remarkable as the survival of the Jews as a distinct community. And yet I doubt that anyone outside of a deep specialist in Middle Eastern history and religion has ever heard of this outfit.

Just another broken shard from our Pottery Barn war, I guess.