We Are Yazidis: Our Identity Is Not a Political Reward
I did not choose to become Yazidi.
Don’t get me wrong: I am grateful to be Yazidi. But this distinction matters. Yazidi identity does not operate according to a modern concept in which belonging can simply be acquired, changed or declared by individual choice. Citizenship can be changed. Religions that accept conversion can be entered or left. Personal identities can be redefined. Traditional Yazidi identity works differently.
I was born Yazidi because my mother and my father are Yazidi. This is not a modern lifestyle identity, a political affiliation or a label that can be adopted and discarded according to personal preference. According to the traditional understanding of our community, Yazidi identity is inherited through two Yazidi parents.
A Yazidi may believe that he is also Kurdish. He may describe himself as Arab, German or something else. He may support the PKK, the KDP, an Iraqi party or no party at all.
None of that changes the fundamental fact that he is Yazidi.
This distinction matters because the current debate is often deliberately reduced to a question of personal feelings: “Everyone can identify however they want.”
But Yazidi identity is not merely a feeling. It is membership in an endogamous people with its own religion, sacred traditions, social structures, collective memory and history of persecution.
The question is therefore not whether individual Yazidis are allowed to call themselves Kurds. They can believe and say whatever they want.
The question is why some of them demand that the entire Yazidi people must be subordinated to Kurdish identity and why they attack other Yazidis who refuse.
We inherited rules, but not always answers
Like many Yazidis of my generation, I grew up knowing that I was Yazidi without receiving sufficient answers about what that actually meant.
I knew the boundaries of the community before I understood its history. I knew that our identity had to be protected, but not always why. Only as a teenager and young adult, when I began researching independently, did I find answers to questions that should have been addressed much earlier.
Who are we? Where does our religion come from? Why do we preserve our community through two Yazidi parents? Is Yazidi identity merely a Kurdish religion, or are Yazidis a distinct ethno-religious people?
When a community fails to transmit its own knowledge, others fill the vacuum. Political movements, nationalist parties and outside institutions begin explaining Yazidis to Yazidis.
This is how a political interpretation can eventually be presented as an unquestionable historical fact.
Yazidis did not encounter the PKK in 2014
The relationship between Yazidis and the PKK did not begin on Mount Şingal in August 2014.
Yazidis had been active within the PKK and the wider Kurdish movement for decades. Yazidi men and women joined its structures, fought in its ranks, organised in the diaspora and died for the idea of Kurdistan long before ISIS attacked Şingal.
This history must not be erased.
When people ask, “Who saved us in 2014?”, they often speak as if an external movement appeared, rescued passive Yazidis and thereby earned permanent ownership over their political loyalty and identity.
But Yazidis were not merely recipients of PKK sacrifices. Yazidis themselves sacrificed for the PKK and for the Kurdish cause.
They gave their labour, loyalty, bodies and lives to that movement.
The relationship was never a one-sided gift.
Recognising this does not diminish the role of PKK and YPG/YPJ fighters in 2014. They helped open and defend an escape corridor through Syria and contributed decisively to the survival of tens of thousands of Yazidis trapped on Mount Şingal.
That is a historical fact.
But another fact must be stated just as clearly: Yazidis do not owe the surrender of their identity in exchange.
“Who saved us?” Who left Şingal defenceless?
When party loyalists use the question “Who saved us in 2014, you ungrateful people?” as a conversation-ending argument, they deliberately isolate one part of the story from everything that happened before it.
They speak about those who later opened an escape corridor, but ignore the forces that had controlled Şingal and then withdrew as ISIS approached.
If the question “Who saved us?” is supposed to determine our identity and political loyalty, another question must also be permitted:
Who helped create the conditions in which the genocide became possible?
Before ISIS entered the Yazidi villages, Peshmerga forces stationed in the region withdrew. Many Yazidis were not warned, were not evacuated and were not given the weapons they had reportedly requested to defend themselves. A population that had been told it was protected was left exposed to an advancing genocidal organisation.
Those who demand eternal gratitude for the rescue rarely want to discuss this abandonment. But history cannot begin only at the moment most useful to a political narrative.
We cannot be ordered to remember who opened an escape route while being forbidden to ask who left the road to Şingal open for ISIS.
I examine that part of the story separately in The Betrayal of Şingal: How the Peshmerga Rolled Out the Red Carpet for ISIS.
Gratitude for those who rescued Yazidis does not erase responsibility for the decisions that first left them defenceless. Both truths belong to the history of August 2014.
Rescue creates no right of ownership
Saving people does not make them your property.
It does not grant political ownership over their community. It does not create a right to occupy their homeland, determine their future or assimilate their identity into a larger nationalist project.
Gratitude cannot be converted into territorial authority.
We helped you survive; therefore your land belongs within our political project.
We defended you; therefore you must accept our definition of your identity.
No organisation can demand that because its fighters died for Yazidis, Yazidis must deny that they are a distinct people, especially when Yazidis themselves had already fought and died for that organisation for decades.
The rescue of Yazidis in 2014 cannot justify the political takeover of Şingal, competing territorial claims, external control over Yazidi institutions or the assimilation of Yazidi identity.
Şingal is not a reward to be distributed among the parties that fought ISIS. It is a central homeland of the Yazidi people.
Yazidis are not political territory.
“We are the original Kurds”
The claim that Yazidis are the “original Kurds” sounds flattering. It appears to give Yazidis an ancient and honoured position within Kurdish history.
But it also performs a political function.
It takes Yazidi religion, history and ancestry and places all of them inside a Kurdish national framework. Yazidis are allowed to be special, but only as long as their distinctiveness ultimately confirms another nation’s story.
Under this interpretation, Yazidi religion becomes the “original Kurdish religion.” Yazidi sacred traditions become remnants of an ancient Kurdish past. Yazidi ancestors become “the first Kurds.”
The Yazidi people disappear while Yazidism survives only as evidence for Kurdish antiquity.
That is not recognition. It is absorption.
A narrative can praise a community while simultaneously erasing its independent existence.
Language is not ownership
The next argument is predictable:
If Yazidis are not Kurds, what language do they speak?
Most Yazidis from Turkey, Syria and Şingal speak Ezdikî, linguistically classified as a variety of Kurmanji. Other Yazidi communities speak Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Russian or the dominant languages of their countries.
Language matters. But language does not give one nation ownership over every community that speaks it.
Languages cross ethnic and religious borders. They change through migration, political domination, education and contact between neighbouring peoples. A shared language alone cannot settle every question of origin or collective identity.
More importantly, Yazidis did not simply borrow a neutral language. Generations of Yazidis preserved their Qewls, prayers, religious terminology and collective memory through Ezdikî.
It is our language because our people carried and shaped it.
Calling it Kurdish does not transform Yazidis into a Kurdish religious sect. Nor does linguistic classification give Kurdish parties the authority to decide who we are.
When party loyalty turns against one’s own people
Political loyalty becomes dangerous when it becomes stronger than loyalty to one’s own community.
Some Yazidis react aggressively when other Yazidis assert an independent identity. They treat disagreement not as an internal debate, but as betrayal of Kurdistan, the PKK or those who fought in 2014.
The result is that Yazidis begin attacking other Yazidis on behalf of a political project.
The most extreme statements reveal how far this can go:
No wonder they wanted to destroy you.
Perhaps the Yazidis of Şingal provoked the genocide.
These are not political arguments. They are victim-blaming and verbal participation in genocidal logic.
ISIS did not attack Yazidis because Yazidis held the wrong opinion about Kurdish nationalism. ISIS attacked them because they were Yazidi. Men were murdered, women and children were enslaved, families were destroyed and an ancient community was targeted for annihilation.
Any Yazidi who uses that genocide to silence other Yazidis has crossed a fundamental boundary.
No disagreement about ethnicity, language, the PKK or Kurdistan can justify saying that Yazidis provoked their own destruction.
Yazidis owe no party their disappearance
Yazidis have contributed to Kurdish movements for decades. They have fought, organised, suffered imprisonment and died for the idea of Kurdistan.
Their sacrifices must be acknowledged.
But those sacrifices cannot be used as evidence that Yazidis are merely Kurds with a different religion. Nor can the events of 2014 be turned into a permanent political debt.
Yazidis do not owe the PKK, the KDP or any other party their assimilation.
They do not owe anyone their land.
They do not owe anyone the abandonment of their name, their history or their existence as a people.
A Yazidi may consider himself Kurdish. That is his belief. But his belief cannot redefine an entire people, and it cannot erase the Yazidi identity he inherited from his parents.
We are not Yazidis because a state, party or academic institution recognises us.
We are Yazidis because we descend from Yazidis, were preserved by Yazidis and inherited a religious and communal tradition that survived repeated attempts to destroy it.
Political alliances may change. Parties may rise and disappear.
But the Yazidi people must not disappear inside somebody else’s national story.
