Lalish Temple and the plight of the Yazidis

Yazidis in 2014 fleeing for their lives as ISIS swept into their homeland.

The Yazidis are surely some of history's most persecuted people. I remember watching in horror the 2014 footage of helicopters airlifting stranded women and children from Mount Sinjar in Northern Iraq. ISIS had stormed through Yazidi territory, murdering the men and forcing the women into sexual slavery. Up to 70,000 made it to Mount Sinjar as ISIS bore down on them. It was hot and there was no water and as many as 100 of them died of dehydration. It took the world too long to act.

It is always thus, it seems, for the Yazidis.  

Nadia Morad, the young Nobel Peace Prize recipient, writes that her people have

With Nadia Murad.

been targeted for genocide more than 70 times. This last time, at the hands of ISIS, may have been the most horrific. And the most unforgivable. For it took place before the unseeing eyes of the world. Those Yazidis who could envisage their future at the hands of the Islamic monsters who were storming towards them fled up their sacred Sinjar Mountain. The more optimistic remained in place. 

And paid the price. 

The men were taken behind a school building, lined up, shot and thrown into mass graves. The young girls - as many as 6,000 of them - were kidnapped and forced into slavery, raped over and over again by men of God who claimed their book permitted such horrors because the girls were spoils of war - and non-Islamic. Thousands of others were killed during forced conversions to Islam. 

Those who ran for the Mount, realized soon enough there was no sanctuary there, only death of a different kind: from starvation or exhaustion. More than 500,000 Yazidi refugees were created by ISIS' savagery - anywhere from a half to two-thirds of their entire population. More than 100,000 Yazidis remain in camps within their own country, waiting, waiting, waiting. I have met with some of the female survivors in these camps and it is difficult to know what to say. Their stories are too awful, their hearts shattered into too many pieces. New indignities mount up: they have to choose to stay in the camps rather than returning home. For political/tribal/territorial chest thumping between rival power centers has meant there is no security in what remains of their demolished towns. Others simply don't want to return because home is now etched into their nightmares as the place they watched their brothers, fathers, and uncles executed. Home is no more. 

With the new Yazidi baba sheik.

And then there is the issue of their children. While the Yazidi Spiritual Council decided to accept back the women who had been forced to marry ISIS members and be raped by them, it decided not to accept their children. It is decreed that anyone having sex outside of the faith can be cast out. Reformers among the Yazidis are powerless and in the diaspora, the majority of them in Germany and other European countries.

Today there are less than a million Yazidis left (accurate numbers are elusive), and half of those are spread to the four corners of the world. Some survivors sitting in camps say that not providing them a safe home to return to is a continuation of ISIS' goals: A slower but perhaps more definitive genocide. Only this time the international community has some culpability.

It is a tough history to come to grips with. It is tougher still not to rage at the inhumanity of it all. These are not sad times from the distant past we are looking back on. ISIS was largely defeated in 2017; these travails continue to this day. I challenge anyone to read Nadia Murad's The Last Girl and not be enraged, anguished and altered.

Lalish Temple.

Knowing all this, it was a profound honor to have the opportunity to visit Lalish Temple, the Yazidi's holiest site and soon to be UNESCO World Heritage Site, which the U.S. government is currently restoring. 

A series of caves.

Standing at the gates of Lalish Temple, I was overcome by the heavy history of the place, but also profoundly moved by its earnest simplicity. There is no Vatican excess here, nor the scale of Mecca or the glamor of the Sikhs' Golden Temple in Amritsar. Most every Hindu temple in any Indian village is grander than Lalish. But there you are in splendid functionality, and suddenly you are wondering why your visits with God need always to be held in gilded hallways. Stepping over the threshold - you must never step on the threshold - you head into a hallway that has been built over thousands of years, and into caves used by Yazidis for more than 4,000 years. There in the near darkness broken only by the orange glow of oil lamps it is just you and your thoughts of the universe.

Oil for the lamps in the cave. (No, this is not a black and white picture.)

Yazidis believe in one God who made the world and then passed it on to seven angels for safekeeping. The septet is led by Melek Taus, the peacock angel, who is in charge of the world as it is today. Yazidism is not easily understood by outsiders. Fire, water, earth, and air are sacred to them and not to be polluted. Yazidis believe in rebirth and pray facing the sun, leading some to call them sun worshippers. Others associate Melek Taus with their own devil - he refused to bow to the first humans, even upon God's orders, like Islam's Iblis. So they refer to the Yazidis as devil worshippers; labels to describe the other - and give permission for genocide.

Gas flaring.

Lalish is located at about 3,300 feet a few miles from the town of Shekan. Every Yazidi is expected to make a six-day pilgrimage here at least once in their life. This, too, underscores the isolation of the place. You head up into the rock-strewn hills that are stubbled with stubborn shrubs. Flares from nearby oil plants shoot into the sky day and night. There is no infrastructure for pilgrims, no chain hotels, few restaurants or tacky souvenir shops. One minute you're out in the countryside, then you take a turn off the main road and suddenly you're at Lalish. There aren't acres of parking lots. In fact, cars were parked at the side of the road the day I was there as if the interest in this 4,000-year-old site catches people unaware every day. There's no signage. Nothing, in fact, to indicate you are approaching a sacred site.

Lalish Temple.

Oh, but once you're there you come under the spell of the place. You step across

Oil lamps.

the threshold and are immediately in a renovation site. The work to save the temple's roof from collapse is ongoing. We are hurried through this dark hall to the caves. It is dank and cool, the floors worn smooth by thousands of years of the shoeless faithful. 

At the center of the complex is the tomb of Sheikh Abi ibn Musafir, born in the 11th Century and believed to be a reincarnation of the peacock angel. It is customary to walk around his tomb silently. There is another tomb further into the cave, belonging to Sheikh Hesen, executed by the Mongols in the 13th Century. Yes, the Mongols! Here, in the dripping darkness you are in the womb of history and spirituality. For millennia the Yazidis have been charting their spiritual journey through these caves. From inside here it is possible to feel safe, for the outside world with all its roiling forces of discontent and hatred seems a long way off.

That world showed its face again in 2014. In addition to chasing the Yazidis up Mount Sinjar, ISIS also laid siege to Lalish and the area around it. They were dark times. Shekan emptied itself of all but about 500 inhabitants. The rest fled, seeking safety anywhere. It wasn't until the Kurdish Peshmerga - which initially pulled out of Sinjar, giving ISIS free range - regrouped and an international coalition formed that the battle was taken to the invading monsters. The fight took until 2017. Thousands of Yazidis remain missing. And almost monthly new mass graves are unearthed. Slowly they are reburying their dead in the spiritual lands. Still, activists, including Nadia Murad, warn that unless Yazidi areas are made safe enough for the diaspora and the IDPs to return home, the prospect remains very real that the Yazidis, as a people, a religion, a culture, may not have the numbers to survive.