I Hate This

[David Morris]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/A_Religious_War

*There is nothing like* a good decade of freedom-bombing to reignite deadly
religious strife
<http://time.com/3085270/iraq-yazidi-mount-sinjar-islamic-state-refugees/?xid=newsletter-brief>

<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/thousands-iraqi-refugees-are-trapped-without-food-or-water-mountains-surrounded-militia-180952259/>reaching
deeply into the past.

In the country's far northwest, tens of thousands of people fleeing the
Sunni extremist group Islamic State have been trapped on a mountain for
days without water or other supplies. The refugees, primarily from the
country's Yazidi religious sect, have begun to die from dehydration and
exposure, with no relief in sight. They face an excruciating dilemma -
attempt to flee and risk being captured and killed by insurgents, or remain
on Mount Sinjar in the hope that aid will somehow get through.

And the Yezidi, who are trapped on a mountain and very likely will die
there, who might they be, anyway?

Islamic State, which is notorious for its hatred of any group that does not
abide by its fundamentalist interpretation of Sunni Islam, is particularly
harsh on the Yazidi, who follow an ancient religion with resemblances to
Zoroastrianism. Reports and photos posted by Islamic State earlier appeared
to show summary executions of Yazidi men. The insurgents have "been
behaving in a very brutal way with everybody," says Rovera. "With the
Yazidi, it's worse, simply because the Yazidis' religion [is] considered
devil worship."

Zoroastrianism. It isn't even accurate to call what is happening here
"medieval." It goes back longer into history than that. The Yezidi are
a fascinating
sect  <http://www.yeziditruth.org/yezidi_religious_tradition>in a region
that doesn't exactly lack for them.

Tawsi Melek, the "Peacock Angel" and "Peacock King," is the most import
deity of the Yezidis. But he is not just the possession of the Yezidis, he
belongs to the entire world. The Yezidis believe that they possess the
oldest religion on Earth, the primeval faith that features Tawsi Melek, and
that all other traditions are related to them through the Peacock Angel.
They contend that Tawsi Melek is the true creator and ruler of the
universe, and therefore a part of all religious traditions. He does not,
however, always manifest within these diverse traditions as a peacock.
Tawsi Melek has taken on many other forms throughout time. The Yezidis do
not believe that the Peacock Angel is the Supreme God. The Supreme God
created him as an emanation at the beginning of time. He was brought into
manifestation in order to give the invisible, transcendental Supreme God a
vehicle with which to create and administer the universe. Tawsi Melek is
thus a tangible, denser form of the infinite Supreme God. In order to
assist Tawsi Melek in this important role, the Supreme Creator also created
six other Great Angels, who were, like the Peacock Angel, emanations of the
Supreme God and not separate from him.

Unfortunately, for the past 700 years, and largely at the hands of Muslim
armies and Muslim governments, the Yezidi have been subject to periodic
attempts at genocide. Secular governments weren't much better; Saddam
Hussein displaced them from their villages and stirred up religious hatred
against them for his own purposes. And now ISIS has stepped to center stage
in the bloody pageant.

"It's not possible to get to them by road, obviously because ISIS controls
the access roads, so nobody can go, they cannot leave," Donatella Rovera,
Amnesty International's senior crisis response adviser, told TIME by phone
from northern Iraq on Wednesday. "It's going to take a few more days before
things coalesce into a more coordinated response." On Tuesday, the United
Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported that at least 40 children holed
up on the mountain had died as result of dehydration.

Maybe kicking over the hornet's nest
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/friend-flees-horror-isis> for
the purposes of draining the swamp on the advice of people who didn't know
fk-all what they were doing, or enabling said exercise,
<http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/An-author-s-confession-he-got-the-war-wrong-2590936.php>has
turned out to be not such a good idea after all. There were people who got
it right.There were people
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/29/iraq.usa> to whom other
people should have listened. The hornets are going to fly free for a very
long time.
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