2 Yazidis killed west of Mosul

NINEWA / IraqiNews.com: A civilian man and his wife of Yazidi faith were strangled to death by unidentified persons west of Mosul, a security source from the Ninewa police department said on Monday. “A Yazidi coule were killed last night inside their home in al-Jazeera compound in al-Bijaaj district, west of Mosul, by unknown persons who strangled them to death,” the source told IraqiNews.com. The Yazidi faith is not a missionary religion. Its followers are concentrated in northern Iraq. According to the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), there are about 800,000 Yazidis all over the world. 550,000 of them live in Iraq and concentrated in the district of Sinjar, where the temple Lalesh is considered their holiest shrine, the district of al-Shaykhan (50 km north of Mosul), the district of Bueshiqa (15 km east of Mosul) and some other areas and villages in the provinces of Ninewa and Duhuk. Yazidis worship seven angels, in the form of peacocks, who are subordinate to the supreme god who created the universe. In April 2007, a Yazidi teenage girl was brutally beaten, kicked and stoned to death in northern Iraq by other Yazidis in what authorities said was an “honor killing” after she was seen with a Sunni Muslim man. Although she had not married him or converted, her attackers believed she had. Twenty-three Yazidis were slain in April 2007 by gunmen who apparently targeted them among passengers on a bus in northern Iraq. The Yazidis condemn mixing with people of another faith. AmR (S) 1