Why Is Lalish Still Not a UNESCO World Heritage Site?
I had hoped that after ISIS, the world might finally see us.
After the murders, the abductions, the women and children treated as property, I thought some lasting interest in our lives might follow the horror at what had been done to them. People would learn something beyond the circumstances of our suffering. Our history. Our faith. Our voices. What we wanted to preserve and what we needed to rebuild.
Perhaps that was asking too much of an attention span.
I am tired of encountering Yazidis at the same two doorways: tragedy and curiosity. Through one comes the survivor, expected to open a wound for an audience. Through the other comes the “mysterious religion”, ready for inspection. Who do they worship? Why do they marry within their community? Why are they so secretive?
Even when the subject changes, the examination continues. We are still being asked to account for our existence.
When do we get to ask the questions?
I have one about Lalish.
On 15 April 2020, Iraq’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities submitted the Yazidi sanctuary to UNESCO’s Tentative List. Six years later, the current UNESCO record still places it there.
Where does the nomination stand?
It is an ordinary question. It should have an ordinary answer: an institution, a stage of work, a list of outstanding requirements and a timetable. Instead, the public material I could verify leaves me unable to establish whether a complete nomination dossier has been submitted.
That does not prove that nobody is working. It does mean that the page people keep sharing cannot tell us what has happened since.
And I am sick of mistaking the existence of a page for evidence of progress.
Give us an answer we can check
Accuracy matters here. Lalish was not promised World Heritage status in 2020. A tentative listing is an initial step, followed by a separate nomination and evaluation process. UNESCO describes tentative lists as identifying possible nominations over a five-to-ten-year horizon.
Six years, by itself, is not evidence of deliberate obstruction. I found no verified decision rejecting Lalish.
But there is nothing unreasonable about asking the institutions involved to explain their work.
Has a full dossier been submitted? If so, when? If not, what is missing? Who is responsible for completing it? How are Yazidi custodians and researchers involved?
These questions require information. A speech about the importance of cultural diversity will not answer them.
Neither will another photograph of an official standing respectfully at a sacred site.
Give us something more useful than a gesture. Give us an answer we can check.
The published submission raises questions of its own. It makes sweeping connections between Yazidi religion, Mithraism and ancient Babylonian religion without providing a bibliography through which a reader can assess those claims. Its account of protection and management remains general.
These are my criticisms of the available text, not documented reasons for a UNESCO rejection. The distinction is important. UNESCO also states that responsibility for tentative-list content rests with the submitting country.
So who reviewed this account of us?
Which claims were checked? Which interpretations were debated? Who decided that this was an adequate way to present Lalish to the world?
An international website should not become a machine that turns an assertion into authority simply by displaying it beneath a respected name.
Our religious traditions deserve care. Our history deserves evidence. Our custodians deserve a meaningful voice in how their heritage is represented.
That should be the starting point.
We are exhausted by the inspection
Perhaps this would sting less if it did not sit inside a larger, familiar experience: other people explaining us, classifying us and deciding which parts of us deserve respect.
The repeated fascination with our endogamy. The easy use of “secretive”. The assumption that a faith must resemble something familiar before it can be understood on its own terms.
We are an ethnoreligious people. Our boundaries are not an invitation for every passing observer to appoint themselves our reformer.
To those who preach Christian love while treating Yazidi difference as a defect: practise the love before delivering the lecture.
To anyone treating Judaism, Christianity or Islam as the standard against which all other traditions must justify themselves: your familiarity with a belief does not establish its superiority. Your conviction does not give you authority over ours.
I have had enough of the civilising tone. The raised eyebrow. The polite suggestion that we might become easier to accept if we surrendered the things that make us difficult to categorise.
We have already addressed why misinformation about Yazidis persists. I refuse to accept that correcting it must remain our permanent entrance examination into public life.
We do not owe you a more convenient version of ourselves.
Sympathy has to survive the photograph
When I see the sustained international mobilisation around Palestinian rights, I ask what it would take to build that persistence around Yazidi demands.
I want attention that remains after an anniversary. People following a case after it stops generating headlines. Institutions that ask for an answer, receive an evasion and ask again.
Pointing out that Yazidi organisations exist does not settle this question. Their work matters enormously. Their existence says little, by itself, about the resources and influence available to them.
A small organisation can document a crime and still be unable to secure accountability. An advocate can spend years demanding protection without acquiring the power to provide it. Volunteers can exhaust themselves doing work that public institutions should have taken responsibility for.
I will not confuse their determination with institutional power.
We are not Muslim. We are not Arab. Neither should be a condition for solidarity. Anyone claiming to defend vulnerable communities should be able to support Yazidi rights without first finding a way to fold us into a more politically useful identity.
And that solidarity must survive uncomfortable facts.
Fawzia Sido was abducted by ISIS in Iraq in 2014, when she was eleven. She was later taken to Gaza and returned to Iraq in 2024 after a decade of captivity.
Eleven years old.
While other children were growing into lives they could imagine, hers was being controlled by people who had no right to a single hour of it.
I will not soften the language of enslavement because the location of her captivity makes somebody’s politics uncomfortable. Those responsible must be judged for what they did. Her suffering cannot be edited around a preferred narrative.
Nor should she have to spend the rest of her life proving that suffering to strangers.
She deserves a future that belongs to her.
Our name is not payment for protection
The right to speak in our own name should not depend on permission from a more powerful neighbour.
I reject any Kurdish nationalist demand that makes solidarity conditional on Yazidis accepting an identity assigned to them. Protection does not purchase ownership. Political influence does not confer the right to define another people.
Our identity is not a political reward.
As long as our distinct ethnoreligious identity remains something outsiders feel entitled to negotiate, we remain vulnerable to political captivity. Someone else claims to speak for us. Someone else decides which demands are acceptable. Someone else expects gratitude for allowing us a place beneath their flag.
A hand around your throat does not become a helping hand because it promises to keep you safe.
Recognition must mean more than saying our name correctly at a conference. It needs to be reflected in enforceable rights, independent representation and security that does not depend on political obedience.
Recognition alone cannot stop an attack. But a people whose voice can be overridden whenever it becomes inconvenient cannot rely on recognition alone, either.
I want protection that survives a disagreement.
We have responsibilities, too
And I want us to stop wasting the strength we do have.
We speak about Tifaq. Then comes the harder test: supporting useful work when the credit goes to somebody we dislike.
Can we do it?
Can we maintain a shared demand across family loyalties, personal rivalries and political divisions? Can a project survive an argument? Can we leave the next person an archive, a functioning institution, a record of what has already been tried?
Or must every committed person begin again among the ruins of somebody else’s disagreement?
Our divisions do not excuse those who harm us. Responsibility for violence belongs to its perpetrators.
But we are responsible for what we build together. Scattered across countries, we cannot afford to turn every difference into another broken connection.
Our children should inherit more than our unfinished arguments.
Lalish deserves more than an anniversary
Lalish does not need UNESCO to make it sacred.
A committee did not give it its place in Yazidi life. A designation cannot create that relationship, and the absence of one cannot take it away.
But once a state begins an international recognition process, the people concerned are entitled to ask what it is doing.
The Iraqi ministry should explain the status of the nomination. UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre should clarify what it has received. Those preparing the case should explain how Yazidi knowledge and custodianship shape the work.
If documentation is incomplete, identify it. If funding is missing, specify the shortfall. If responsibilities are disputed, name the institutions involved.
Then tell us what happens next.
I am tired of having to excavate basic answers from the institutions entrusted with recognising heritage. I am tired of wondering whether another year will end with the same link, the same date and the same unanswered questions.
I had hoped the world would become curious about our lives after witnessing the attempt to destroy them.
I still demand that it does.
Our children deserve institutions that defend their rights, records that preserve their memory and the freedom to speak without somebody correcting the name of their people.
They deserve more than a future in which condolences are easier to obtain than protection.
Do not wait until we are dead to become eloquent about our worth.
I do not need to be Baba Yaga or Nostradamus to know that we Yazidis are unprotected and will face another genocide, which could come at any moment.
How do I know? History.
