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Genocide in Tranquil Kurdistan
WASHINGTON-The next time you hear confident assurances from the White House and its supporters that the "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq is working and that something called "victory" is now within sight, remember the Yazidis.
The who? Before Tuesday, you almost certainly would have asked that question-before two villages in northern Iraq, populated by an obscure religious sect, suffered what is now officially the deadliest terrorist attack of the war, with more than 400 people confirmed dead. The final toll is expected to rise, but the coordinated suicide truck bombings in the Yazidi towns already constitute the second-worst terrorist attack of modern times, trailing only the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001.
Thanks to online encyclopedias, veteran foreign correspondents and the work of dedicated scholars, we now have a boilerplate definition. The Yazidis are ethnic Kurds who practice an ancient, pre-Islamic religion. Among their beliefs is that God created seven archangels, one of whom is sometimes called Shaytan, which is the name given to Satan in the Koran. This has led some Muslims to believe, incorrectly, that the Yazidis are devil-worshipers.
We also now know that in April, a Yazidi woman who had married a Muslim and converted to Islam was stoned to death by irate members of her community. This horror was captured on video and disseminated widely; angry Muslims gunned down 23 Yazidis in reprisal.
We can state these facts with confidence. But the truth is that we have only the most superficial idea of who the Yazidis are-and even less of a clue about who might have visited such utter devastation on their villages.
It was al-Qaida, U.S. military officers quickly announced. And maybe it was. Maybe it was part of an al-Qaidaal-Qaida effort to create chaos in the Kurdish northern provinces of Iraq, which are often held up as the great success story of the U.S. invasion-an oasis of relative peace and tranquility, if you discount the occasional stoning or retaliatory massacre.
But the White House and the U.S. military leadership in Iraq generally blame al-Qaida for trying to foment sectarian and ethnic violence by driving wedges between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. In that context, the Yazidi sect is so tiny as to be inconsequential-hardly worth al-Qaida's time and effort.
The bombings Tuesday looked more like an act of genocide, an attempt to erase as many Yazidis as possible from the face of the Earth. The motive for this atrocity might not have been political but religious; it might have been the work of Muslim fundamentalists who were trying to settle a centuries-old local grievance, rather than the work of Muslim fundamentalists trying to drive the Americans out of Iraq or establish a new caliphate in the Middle East.
The point is that here in Washington, we talk about Iraq as if we were intimately familiar with all its fractures, fissures and fault lines. The Bush administration touts as a breakthrough the recent decision of provincial Sunni Muslim sheiks to cooperate with U.S. forces-but it's also possible that the sheiks are just maneuvering to be in a better position when the Americans eventually leave. The administration says there might be genocide if the United States pulls out-but it looks as if genocide has already been attempted, in the part of Iraq that the White House cites as a model.
Some war critics confidently predict that if the United States were to withdraw its troops, the al-Qaida presence in Iraq would quickly become a non-factor-that foreign-born terrorists, having outlived their usefulness to the Sunni community, would be driven out or otherwise neutralized.
I happen to think this is a reasonable hypothesis. But I'm anything but confident.
There are those who will see Tuesday's awful bombings as an illustration of why U.S. forces should stay in Iraq. I see the carnage as an illustration of how little the presence of 162,000 American troops can accomplish in a country the size of Iraq.
I don't think anyone knows with certainty where "al-Qaida in Iraq" ends and "the Sunni insurgency" begins. I don't think anyone knows with certainty how the various Shiite factions will ultimately line up-or even whether a unitary Iraq, having been shattered by the U.S. invasion, can ever be reassembled.
What I do know is that anyone who says American forces have to stay in Iraq because they're protecting the Iraqi people should tell that to the Yazidis. Those who are left.
Eugene Robinson's e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.
© 2007 Truthdig, L.L.C.
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8 Comments so far
Show AllAll religions suck.
"...we talk about Iraq as if we were intimately familiar with all its fractures, fissures and fault lines."
Endless articles should be written about this subject alone!
America is so fucked up it thinks it doesn't even have to know its enemy. We haven't known our enemy since WW2. All our wars since then have been political. Prosecuted from the White House and impacted on various other parts of the world. The war becomes political capital in D.C. and the consequences are for the other side. A few dead Americans are good for the cheerleaders to whip up support but the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories will be a lesson learned by the planners of war. They won't have to manufacture heroes once the Military is privatized. Then the politicians will suffer no consequences of the wars they manage.
Hoa binh
Yazidis are viewed as devil worshippers by most people throughout the world and particularly inside Iraq. Yazdanism is NOT a denomination of Islam, rather a religion in and of itself - and it is viewed as an evil one. One may compare Yazdanism to Satanism in this regard. Even Anton LeVay called the Yazidi a devil worshipping sect primarily due to how they view God and God's role in the world.
I am not condoning what happened to them. After all, Yazidis are very rare in the world - not many of them left. I am just stating a possibile reason as to why they were killed.
Lynch and Tillman are the latest in a long line of poster-warriors drafted for the furtherance of the military-industrial complex. Ever hear of Colin P Kelly? He was a B-17 pilot shot down by the Japanese Navy in the Pacific in early 1942. Those were dark days for moral in the US, what with Pearl Harbor still burning and the war in both the Pacific and Europe not going well. America needed a hero, and Kelly was it. The true story of his and his crew's sacrifice, being shot down by superior Japanese forces while trying to bomb a Japanese ship, was apparently officially deemed too mundane. Instead he was credited with sinking the battleship Haruna and awarded the Medal of Honor. After some "harmless" fabrication America had her hero. Happens every war...
"Some war critics confidently predict that if the United States were to withdraw its troops, the al-Qaida presence in Iraq would quickly become a non-factor-that foreign-born terrorists, having outlived their usefulness to the Sunni community, would be driven out or otherwise neutralized.
I happen to think this is a reasonable hypothesis. But I'm anything but confident."
A 'reasonable' hypothesis is supposedly all we had going into Iraq- a war I opposed in 2002. That's why I feel opposed to the suggestion that a full withdrawal without a redeployment of US combat power inside Iraq, a refocus on political confederation (as Petraeus seems to be working on in Al Anbar province, at least on security issues, and perhaps now Maliki on political issues in making his first visit to Tikrit as opposed to trying to center the region-state on Baghdad and divisive issues like 'national' hydrocarbon laws), and the continued training of Iraqi police and armed forces would somehow lead to 'peaceful resolution'. It clearly won't. We've unleahed the Pandora Box. Bush is responsible. But the next American President will also be responsible. And the next president more than likely being a Democrat, makes us responsible, especially right now, for crafting that position as a 'movement'. If Iraqis themselves were in full support of US timelines to withdraw Iraq, (like the Sadr faction), maybe I would feel more like we weren't opening the door to more ethnic 'cleansing', but as it seems only those poised to do the 'cleansing' are in full support I can't get behind that. Some timelines are clearly needed for the sake of our troops, but some better political arrangments to facilitate local solutions are also clearly needed, and who knows what the timelines may eventually be.
I wish as an American Left we could come together against the 'immediate and full withdrawal' line as it simplifies the 'cleansing' of scale minorities and traditionally exploited people in Iraq to banalities and generalities. The Yazidis don't 'deserve' it, any more than we 'deserved' 9/11. I'm not justifying the invasion and occupation of a state that had nothing to do with 9/11, (which I opposed in 2002), but I think to say that one can "see the carnage as an illustration of how little the presence of 162,000 American troops can accomplish in a country the size of Iraq," is also to in a way say that one can't see how much the presence of American troops have accomplished in subnational scales of Iraq that were formerly the province of only the Baath Party dictatorship full of Saddam's sychophants at the top perches.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't sense all Iraqis, (and especially the scale minorities and traditionally exploited peoples of Iraq), look forward to the prospects of not having the US mediate differences, (bring parties to the negotiation table), as we withdraw.
A comment on the Yazidi. In the area, during the age of the sword the muslim conquest followed upon the bzyantines. The ancient tribal religions in the area were crushed but often not completely eradicated. It was said that populations like the Yazidi having endured attempted conquests, atrocities and misrule from both christians and muslims, saw both as having said one thing (preached of God - God is good) and done something else (evil - persecutions, genocidal attacks and betrayals etc.). So the Yazidi saw rejecting the God of those who perpetrated such evils and if satan (common to both religions) was their enemy then ...'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' sort of thing.
So it was said...by the Yazidi...lol. Call it medieval blowback.
Correction > So the Yazidi saw rejecting the God of those who perpetrated such evils as logical*