The Biblical mountain and its modern-day yezidi genocide a civilization’s rebirth and the slow death on the same summit.
Forty-thousand Yezidis that have found a refuge on the summit of the sacred mountain of Sinjar are looking into the eyes of death. This ancient sect of an ancient ethnicity for the first time in its millenials-old history is facing a total annihilation. A total annihilation indeed.
It is here in the ancient Mesopotamia that is now occupied by the countries of Iraq and Syria where the first statehoods of the human civilization – the Sumerian city-states of Ur and Uruq came to be. It is here where the masters of the time – the Assyrians and Babylonians have lived and disappeared and it is here where the two magnificent rivers have given birth to the modern agriculture and the structure of social relations of the human race. Now, in the XXI century, it is here that the time is slowly, but steadily coming to its end. The life is drying and dying and the time returns to where it never was – to a time of gruesome darkness, a kind of prehistoric age, where it breathes death and where biblical demons from the all corners of the world have gathered to establish their rule and their Caliphate. The Islamic State, which is the most brutal and intolerant of all the barbarians that humanity has ever known, and whose atrocities are comparable only to those committed by the Turks and their cronies in the beginning of the last century, are covering with their dark, long beards a six-thousand year old layer of the most important layer of the civilization- the Mesopotamia. Today death and genocide are the rulers of the land and they threaten the guardians of a land that lays by the ancient city of Mosul – the Yezidis of Sinjar.
The Yezidis, who consider themselves a separate ethnicity but are in fact the same Kurds with a different religion and a different adopted identity, have stayed loyal to Zoroastrianism which they have blended with the religions of Jesus and Mohammad. They have even managed to preserve some aspects of a pagan religion that predates the Zoroastrian faith. For centuries the Sunni Arabs of the Mesopotamia have considered the Yezidis pagans, therefore devil worshippers, but have somehow tolerated them. First, it was the complicated and sophisticated social fabric of the region and then it was the absence of the extremist interpretation of Islam that came to its second life in mid 50’s of the last century thanks to its Saudi promoters. Under the Saddam’s rule, Kurds, who had embraced the Sunni Islam centuries ago but had preserved their national identity, were endangered, battled and gassed but not under existential threat. Meanwhile, Yezidis were one of the many ethnic and religious minorities who were enjoying the relative safety of a country ruled by a dictator’s iron fist. It is only after the 2003 invasion when all the stoppers were lifted and the seeds of the Wahhabi Islam found a fertile ground to breed. Today, almost after a decade from the day of the invasion those seeds have given fruits and the fruits have ripened. Iraq, as we knew it, doesn’t exist anymore and will never exist again. Syria also is facing the darkest days of its history. Lebanon shivers in fear of another, potentially even more bloody civil war from which it may never recover again and the lands of Israel and Palestine are facing each other in evergrowing turbulence that seems never to end. But what about the Kurdistan and its most vulnerable inhabitants – the Yezidis ? The Yezidis are the freshest target of the army of jihad and … the most hated one.
Only few know and those few are the important scholars of middle eastern history, that Sinjar is the same mountain as Ararat. Situated in the southern region of Korduk (currently Kurdistan) region of the historic Kingdom of the Greater Armenia, Sinjar is the mountain that before the renaming of the Masis to Ararat (currently in the territory of Turkey) in the Eastern part of Armenia was called Ararat or Ararad. It is the highest summit in the vast area encircled by the two great rivers of the Near East – Tigris and Euphrates. For centuries it has been revered by both the Armenians and the Kurds (including Yezidis) as a sacred mountain and the roots of that reverence lie in the biblical story itself. It is only here that an ark built by Noah could land and it is only here that two great rivers would flood the vast valleys that once were the most fertile ground for agriculture and human development. It is here indeed that Noah found refuge for his ark and for his people and it is here that he sought salvation through patience and perseverance in order to continue the human race and history of civilization. Now, thousands of years later, another people – forty-thousand Yezidis have anchored their ark on top of the same mountain. And it is here that they face the worst flood ever – the black flood of the black-clad fighters of an unholy and a black war.
It was only a hundred years ago when around three hundred miles to the west another mountaintop harbored another people – the Armenians of Cilicia who anchored their ark and started an epic defense so beautifully told by the great Austrian writer Franz Werfel. That defense against genocidal Turks of the last caliphate lasted a forty days and the heroic Armenian fighters of Musa Dag finally found refuge on the treasonous, but somehow repenting French ships that took them away to the safety of Mediterranean waters.
Almost exactly one-hundred years later forty-thousand Yezidis, it seems, that can only envy the Armenian heroes of Musa Dag. This small group of Armenians had weapons, ammunition, spirit to fight and were expecting help from the sea. Their mountain was firm but soft enough to harbor the bodies of the dead. The refugees of the biblical Ararat’s new ark have no weapons to fire, no water to drink, no food to eat and the only sea that they can see is that of the unholy black flags of the messengers of death, that will soon most probably fly over the holy mountain. The refugees of Sinjar-Ararat are already dying of thirst and hunger and are burying their dead under the hard pieces of rock of the unforgiving and inpenetrable mountain. From their dying phones they are sending goodbye texts to relatives far away and pray. And it seems, in the harrowing indifference of the world the only salvation to expect is that of a divine intervention. Nothing else seems to bother the world around – the world and the civilization that were once born right here on the summit of the magnificent Armenian Ararat for the second time and where the civilization as we know it now apparently comes to its end.
History repeats itself. It always repeats and repeats without any major differences. And these reoccurances are often incredibly identical. It was the Armenian people a hundred years ago, now – the Yezidis, the Kurds, the Chaldeans and the Syriacs, the Shias and the Alawis and of course, Armenians again. The history repeats itself and repeats with incredible resemblance. And the only ones who survive the turmoil of history – are those who draw lessons from the darkest pages of the history.
It seems, however, that the humanity and the world have drawn no lessons, even if the most horrendous pages of that history were written only a hundred years ago and rewritten many times since then.
Dr. HAYK A. MARTIROSYAN
Political Scientist,
New York
