Geliyê Alî Beg: The Yazidi History Behind the Waterfall
A beautiful place with an incomplete story
Geliyê Alî Beg is presented as one of the most famous natural attractions in the autonomous region in Iraq. Visitors arrive for the waterfall, the mountain air and the dramatic landscape. Families sit in nearby cafés. Tourism pages describe it as an icon of the region. Its image once appeared on Iraqi currency.
The place is famous. The man whose name it carries is not.
This silence matters. The full history of Geliyê Alî Beg forces an uncomfortable question upon the society and institutions surrounding it. How can a place named after a murdered Yazidi prince become a source of regional pride while the crime behind its name is reduced to a footnote?
Who was Mîr Alî Beg?
Mîr Alî Beg was the Yazidi ruler of Şêxan during the early nineteenth century. His fate is connected to one of the most devastating campaigns against the Yazidis before the modern period.
Between 1832 and 1834, forces of Mîr Muhammad of Rawanduz, ruler of the Sunni Kurdish Emirate of Soran, carried out organised mass violence against Yazidi communities. Religious rulings were used to legitimise attacks on Yazidi lives and property. Villages were attacked. Men were killed. Women and children were captured. Lalish was plundered. Historical research describes thousands of Yazidis being taken prisoner and ordered to accept Islam.
Mîr Alî Beg refused.
He was executed near the end of 1833 in the valley that would later carry his name. Historical accounts also state that his body was left hanging publicly for several days. Some Yazidi accounts describe further mutilation, including beheading. The published sources examined for this article establish his execution and the public display of his body more clearly than the precise method of death.
What is not in doubt is why he was killed. He would not abandon his religion.
His death was not an isolated punishment. It formed part of a campaign intended to destroy Yazidi authority, break Yazidi resistance and force survivors into Islam. The waterfall does not simply carry the name of a man who happened to die nearby. It carries the name of a Yazidi prince murdered during a campaign of extermination and forced conversion.
The name survived. The history was cleaned away.
Today, many tourism and regional history pages describe Geliyê Alî Beg as a beloved waterfall and a symbol of the autonomous region in Iraq. Some mention that it was named after a Yazidi prince. Yet the language often becomes vague at the exact point where responsibility should begin.
Alî Beg is said to have died during troubled events.
He did not simply die. He was executed after refusing to convert to Islam.
The perpetrators were not an unnamed natural force. They belonged to the Emirate of Soran and acted under the rule of Mîr Muhammad of Rawanduz. The victims were not incidental casualties in a romantic struggle between mountain princes. Yazidi communities were massacred, displaced, enslaved and pressured to abandon their faith.
When these facts are removed, Geliyê Alî Beg becomes a beautiful landscape with a mysterious name. The Yazidi prince is allowed to remain only as decoration.
This is how historical appropriation works. The name is kept because it belongs to the land. The Yazidi story attached to it is weakened because it disturbs the national narrative built around that land.
One regional history website offers a clear example. It celebrates the waterfall as the pride of the mountains. It acknowledges that the place was named after Mîr Alî Beg, but describes his death only as part of the troubled events of the early nineteenth century. The massacre, the demand to convert and the identity of the perpetrators disappear behind soft language.
A murder becomes an event. A campaign of forced Islamisation becomes trouble. A Yazidi place of suffering becomes a tourist attraction.
When memory becomes a threat
It would be possible to dismiss this as a dispute about distant history if Geliyê Alî Beg had not returned as a direct threat against Yazidis.
In December 2024, the Yazidi organisation Yazda published a detailed report about hate speech targeting the Yazidi community in Iraq and the autonomous region in Iraq. The report examined a wave of threats that spread in August 2024, ten years after the genocide committed by the so called Islamic State.
Among the people documented was Dr. Osmat Hussain Rekani, identified by Yazda as a professor at the University of Duhok. He did not merely insult one Yazidi. According to the report, he invoked the massacre of 1832 and called for a Yazidi body to be hanged at the Alî Beg waterfall in order to “renew, remember and repeat the history.”
This is not an interpretation invented by overly sensitive Yazidis. It is a documented invocation of a historical crime as a model for present violence.
The message is unmistakable. Remember what happened to Alî Beg. It can happen again.
Geliyê Alî Beg therefore exists in two public languages. In one, it is a beautiful landmark. In the other, it is a warning directed at Yazidis who speak too loudly, resist political conformity or refuse to accept the identity assigned to them.
The same public sphere that celebrates the waterfall still contains voices willing to use its name to remind Yazidis of the price of disobedience.
Worshippers of Evil when we speak, Kurds when we are useful
The professor's statement did not appear in isolation.
Yazda analysed 62 messages collected during the hate campaign of August 2024. Twenty five called for another genocide. Sixteen called for violence. Twenty two described Yazidis as worshippers of Evil, followers of Evil or unbelievers. Other messages glorified the sexual violence committed by the Islamic State against Yazidi women and girls.
Some threatened a seventy fifth genocide. Some called for Lalish to be destroyed. Some claimed that the Islamic State had made a mistake by leaving Yazidis alive.
The language was not confined to private rooms. It circulated publicly on social media. Religious figures, academics and other public voices contributed to an atmosphere in which an entire people could again be described as religiously impure and legitimately killable.
This is where the familiar claim that Yazidis are the “original Kurds” collapses under its own dishonesty.
When a Yazidi footballer such as Deniz Undav succeeds, he can be claimed as Kurdish. When Yazidi history provides an ancient symbol, it can be absorbed into Kurdish history. When Yazidi settlements strengthen a territorial claim, Yazidis become indigenous Kurds.
But when Yazidis insist upon their own identity, remember who persecuted them or challenge political control over their settlements, another language appears. Suddenly they are unbelievers, traitors and worshippers of Evil. They become a people who should be expelled, disciplined or subjected to another genocide.
We cannot be the original members of a nation when we are useful and enemies of that nation when we speak for ourselves.
Silence is also a political decision
Yazda found that authorities reacted slowly and inadequately to the 2024 hate campaign. While legal action was taken against the Yazidi commander whose remarks triggered the controversy, those openly threatening Yazidis with murder and genocide largely escaped comparable consequences.
This is not equal protection. It is a message about whose words are treated as dangerous and whose threats are tolerated.
Thousands of Yazidis reportedly fled displacement camps in the autonomous region in Iraq because they feared renewed violence. They did not flee because of an academic disagreement. They fled because the language surrounding them resembled the language that had preceded earlier persecution.
Their fear was rooted in experience.
Only ten years had passed since the genocide in Şingal. Yazidi women and children remained missing. Families were still living in camps. Graves were still being opened. In that environment, public calls for another genocide were not crude jokes. They were threats directed at survivors.
Yet where was the broad public reckoning? Where were the prosecutions? Where were the universities removing advocates of genocidal violence from positions of authority? Where were the religious institutions confronting the idea that Yazidi blood could be considered permissible?
Where was the sustained educational campaign explaining what happened in 1832 and why invoking it against Yazidis is not patriotism, but incitement?
The silence is part of the story.
Where are recognition, apology and reparation?
If Kurdish political institutions wish to claim Yazidis as part of Kurdish history, they must also accept the Kurdish chapters of Yazidi persecution.
That requires more than calling Yazidis brothers and sisters during commemorative speeches.
Geliyê Alî Beg should contain a visible memorial explaining who Mîr Alî Beg was, who ordered the campaign against the Yazidis, why he was executed and what happened to the Yazidi population of Şêxan.
Schools and universities in the autonomous region in Iraq should teach the history of the Soran campaign without romanticising its ruler or erasing its victims. Public institutions should recognise the campaign as organised mass violence against the Yazidis. Those who invoke Alî Beg's execution as a threat should face real legal and professional consequences. Yazidi scholars, religious representatives and survivors should determine how their history is presented at the site.
There must finally be an honest conversation about acknowledgement, apology and forms of reparation.
None of this has happened at the level the history demands. Instead, the waterfall is photographed, branded and sold. The name of Alî Beg remains everywhere, while the reason for his death is allowed to disappear.
You cannot inherit only the beautiful parts
No person alive today carries personal guilt for a crime committed in 1833 merely because they are Kurdish. Responsibility is not inherited through blood.
But institutions inherit archives, public narratives, monuments and political power. Societies decide which rulers become heroes, which crimes receive names and which victims are asked to remain silent for the sake of unity.
That responsibility exists in the present.
The question is not whether every Kurdish person hates Yazidis. They do not.
The question is why genocidal language against Yazidis can still emerge from religious, academic and public figures without producing the moral and institutional rupture it should produce.
The question is why Mîr Alî Beg can be remembered as the name of a waterfall but not fully honoured as the victim of a campaign of forced Islamisation.
The question is why Yazidis are repeatedly told that they are the original Kurds while their right to describe their own history remains conditional.
A people cannot be claimed and erased at the same time.
You cannot take our land, our names, our heroes and our antiquity, then call our independent identity a betrayal.
You cannot turn the site of a Yazidi prince's execution into a regional postcard and remain vague about who killed him.
And you cannot call us brothers while the memory of his body is still used to threaten ours.
Geliyê Alî Beg is not merely a waterfall. It is a test of whether remembrance can exist without accountability.
So far, the name has survived.
Responsibility has not.
Sources
Majid Hassan Ali, “Genocidal Campaigns during the Ottoman Era: The Firmān of Mīr i Kura against the Yazidi Religious Minority in 1832 to 1834,” Genocide Studies International, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2019.
Christine Allison, study of Yazidi oral tradition in Iraq, 2001.
Birgül Açikyildiz, historical study of the Yazidi community, culture and religion, 2014.
Yazda, report on hate speech against the Yazidi community, December 2024.
