The Yazidis, a minority martyred by the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq, mourned the death of their spiritual leader, Baba Sheikh Khurto Hajji Ismail, guardian of the temple for a quarter of a century on Friday.
By disembarking in the summer of 2014 in the historic Yazidis home on the Sinjar Mountains, the jihadists killed men, transformed the youngest into child soldiers and thousands of women into sex slaves. Atrocities investigated by the United Nations (UN) to determine if they can be described as “Genocide”.
The 4000-year-old Yazidism excommunicates married women outside the community. If this ancestral law had been applied, the Yazidis kidnapped by IS would never have been able to return. But Khurto Hajji Ismail, who died Thursday evening at the age of 87, had led the Yazidi High Spiritual Council to call in an unprecedented way to welcome the survivors.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, 26, a former sex slave of the jihadists, who campaigns, with the Lebanese-British lawyer Amal Clooney, with the international bodies for the crimes of the IS to be judged, hailed on Twitter the memory of the baba sheikh, ” a lighthouse “ for his community which “Treated the Yazidi survivors with love and respect”. In Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, the authorities hailed the memory of a “Man of peace” advocating “Fraternity and friendship”.
His son should succeed him
His son is expected to replace him once the week of mourning is over, officials told Agence France-Presse (AFP). The function is purely spiritual, they explained, with social and political affairs in the hands of the prince of the Yazidis, Hazem Tahsin Bek, inducted in July 2019.
The small Kurd-speaking community, which practices an esoteric monotheistic religion devoid of a sacred book, has been persecuted for centuries by extremists who consider them to be “Satanists”. Entrenched in their stronghold of Sinjar (north), the Yazidis, who venerate seven angels, numbered 550,000 in Iraq in 2014. They are, in total, 1.5 million in the world.
After three years of jihadist occupation, nearly 100,000 have left the country and others are displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan. According to Kurdish authorities, more than 6,400 Yazidis were kidnapped by ISIS and only half of them were able to escape or be rescued. The fate of others is still unknown.
