Güneş Murat Tezcür, #Zeynep Kaya# , Bayar Mustafa Sevdeen

In contemporary Yezidi discourse, violence has a cyclical character, in contrast to interpretations of history that posit the progressively declining role of violence in human affairs.1 A sense of historical victimhood is central to the formation of Yezidis communal identity whose very survival was at stake in different time periods. Accordingly, the IS attacks in 2014 were perceived as the latest in a series of atrocities Yezidis experienced since the medieval times. The attacks are called “the 74rd firman” implying continuity with previous episodes of mass scale violence targeting the community. While the IS attacks involving mass executions and enslavement shocked the conscience of the international community, for Yezidis, the tragedy of August 2014 was not unprecedented in terms of its harm. In the words of a Yezidi leader, “[In 1832], [t]hey took away a thousand of our girls. A thousand was plenty. Our population was much smaller by that …You now see lots of [Sunni] Kurds around. Their fourth or fifth generation ancestors were Yezidis.”2 In his eyes, Yezidis have historically been targeted because of their religious beliefs and subject to sexual violence and forced conversions. The main difference between the past massacres and the current one was the widespread publicity characterizing the IS violence that triggered an international humanitarian intervention, which was in fact unprecedented[1]

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