Who Are the Yazidis? Identity & Misinformation

There has never been more information within reach. Yet some of the most basic descriptions of the Yazidis are still incomplete, politicised or simply wrong. The same phrases move from encyclopedia entries to news reports, from institutional documents to social media, often without anyone asking where they came from, whose interests they serve, or whether Yazidis themselves were consulted.

This is not merely a problem of missing facts. It is a problem of power: who is allowed to define a people, whose version is treated as authoritative, and how repetition can turn a political claim into an apparent truth.

Who are the Yazidis?

The Yazidis are an ethno-religious people indigenous to Mesopotamia and its surrounding regions. Yazidi identity cannot be reduced to religion alone. Community, ancestry, collective memory, sacred tradition, social structure, historical experience and belonging are intertwined.

Yazidism is an endogamous tradition: a person is born into the Yazidi community. The religion has its own sacred oral literature, including the Qewls; its own religious offices and hereditary social groups; its own festivals, rituals and calendar; and its own sacred geography centred on Lalish. These are not detachable customs added to an otherwise unrelated ethnic identity. Together they form a distinct historical community.

Many Yazidis speak Ezdikî (Kurmancî). Others, particularly in Bashiqa and Bahzani, have historically spoken Arabic. Language matters deeply, but language alone does not settle ethnicity. English does not make every English speaker English, and Arabic does not make every Arabic-speaking community Arab. In the same way, speaking Kurmancî does not give another nation the right to determine Yazidi identity.

There is also no honest reason to hide the fact that Yazidis express their identity differently. Some identify as ethnically Kurdish; many identify as a distinct Yazidi people; others use different descriptions depending on country, family history and political environment. Individual self-identification must be respected. But respecting individual choice is not the same as accepting a political system that presents one identity as compulsory and the others as illegitimate.

Identity is never separate from power

For decades, Yazidis in northern Iraq have lived between competing nationalist projects. Under Ba’athist rule, communities suffered Arabisation, forced displacement and pressure to register within state-defined categories. After 2003, Kurdish parties expanded political and institutional influence across disputed territories, including Yazidi areas.

A 2009 Human Rights Watch investigation documented allegations that Kurdish authorities used political patronage, public resources, employment, security structures and intimidation to bring minority communities into the Kurdish national project. The report noted that senior Kurdish leaders interviewed by Human Rights Watch did not recognise Yazidis as a distinct ethnic minority and instead described them as “original Kurds.” It also recorded claims by Yazidi activists who said they were punished for resisting that classification.

This evidence matters because identity does not develop in a vacuum. When schools, parties, cultural institutions, media outlets, employers and security authorities repeat the same national narrative for years, children grow up encountering it not as one political interpretation, but as the only permitted reality.

That is how political influence becomes social common sense. A generation may sincerely repeat what it was taught. Later, when confronted with documents, family histories or Yazidi voices that contradict that framework, the new information can feel like an attack rather than a correction. Familiarity is often mistaken for proof.

This does not mean that every Kurdish person or every Yazidi who identifies as Kurdish is acting dishonestly. Nor does it erase the long history, geography and cultural contact shared by Yazidis and neighbouring peoples. The issue is coercion and monopoly: no nationalist movement should possess the authority to define another community against its will.

Why does misinformation survive in the information age?

Because an abundance of information is not the same as an abundance of investigation.

1. Repetition is mistaken for verification

Many publications copy a short description from an older article, agency text or institutional page. Once the wording appears in enough places, later writers treat the number of repetitions as evidence. In reality, fifty pages may trace back to one unexamined sentence.

2. Journalists work under speed and space constraints

During breaking news, complex identities are compressed into a label that readers are assumed to understand. Yazidis are then described through a larger and more familiar political category. The shorthand survives long after the deadline, even when it obscures the community it claims to explain.

3. External authorities are privileged over Yazidi voices

Researchers and reporters often approach state institutions, dominant regional parties or recognised spokespersons first. A politically powerful neighbour becomes the interpreter of a less powerful people. Yazidis are treated as sources of personal tragedy, while outsiders are treated as sources of knowledge about Yazidi history and identity.

4. The genocide narrowed the public image of Yazidis

After the genocide committed by ISIS in 2014, international coverage understandably focused on mass murder, displacement and the enslavement of women and children. But this frequently reduced an entire people to victimhood. Yazidi survivors have also criticised unethical and extractive reporting practices. When journalists arrive only for catastrophe, they rarely build the knowledge needed to describe the community beyond it.

5. Political categories are presented as neutral facts

Terms used by governments and nationalist movements often enter reporting without explanation. A disputed classification becomes a factual introduction. The political conflict behind the label disappears, while the label remains.

What responsible reporting should do

Responsible reporting does not have to settle every historical debate. It does have to disclose that a debate exists and avoid presenting the position of the most powerful actor as uncontested fact.

Describe Yazidis as an ethno-religious people, not merely as a religious branch of another nation.
Separate language, ethnicity, religion, citizenship and geography instead of treating them as interchangeable.
Recognise the diversity of Yazidi self-identification without using that diversity to erase distinct Yazidi identity.
Consult Yazidi historians, religious specialists, journalists, organisations and community members from different regions and political backgrounds.
Ask who produced a familiar definition, under what political conditions, and whether later publications independently verified it.

The right to define ourselves

The question “Who are the Yazidis?” is often answered as though Yazidis were absent from the room. That must change.

Yazidis are not a footnote to someone else’s national story. They are not only the victims of 2014, not a curiosity assembled from fragments of other religions, and not a population whose identity can be decided by the language it speaks or the territory it inhabits.

Information becomes truthful only when it is examined. Repetition is not research. Political power is not historical proof. And solidarity with Yazidis must include something basic: the right of Yazidis to name, describe and debate their own identity without coercion.