Gunmen shoot down 7 Yazidis in Sinjar

NINEWA / IraqiNews.com: Seven members of a Yazidi family were killed by unidentified gunmen who attacked their house in the district of Sinjar, northwest of Mosul city, a police source in Ninewa said on Monday. “Unidentified gunmen stormed the house of a Yazidi family in al-Yarmuk compound, Sinjar, at a late hour on Sunday night and opened fire at the people inside, killing three women and four men,” the source told IraqiNews.com. Sinjar, 120 km northwest of Mosul, is inhabited by Yazidis, a religious minority whose followers are generally situated in northern Iraq. Some 350,000 Yazidis live in villages around Mosul, 402 km north of Baghdad. 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 the holiest shrine for Yazidis, 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 are primarily ethnic Kurds and most live near Mosul, with smaller communities in Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Russia, Syria, and Turkey. The estimates of their population size vary, partially due to the Yazidi tradition of secrecy about their religious beliefs. Yazidis worship seven angels, in the form of peacocks, who are subordinate to the supreme god who created the universe. A couple of related incidents in the spring highlighted the tensions between Sunnis and Yazidis. In April 2007, a Kurdish 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. The Yazidis condemn mixing with people of another faith. AmR (S) 1