Genocidal Campaigns during the Ottoman Era: The Firmān of Mīr-i-Kura against the Yazidi Religious Minority in 1832–1834.
Majid Hassan Ali
University of Duhok and University of Bamberg
2019

This article examines books and works of locals and Western travellers in which historical evidence has been used by the current author to construct a narrative of the Yazidi genocides. The sources examined describe what the Ottoman and Kurdish princes were doing to the Yazidis at a time when genocide was not defined in legal terms. The Kurdish princes’ firmāns (genocidal campaigns) stripped the Yazidi people of much of their land and resulted in thousands of deaths. These genocidal campaigns in the mid-nineteenth century had all the features of a modern genocide. This article engages with such military campaigns against Yazidis by focusing on the firmān of Mīr (prince) Muḥammad Pāshā Rawwānduzī (nicknamed Mīr-i-Kura) in 1832–1834, which targeted Yazidi regions from Erbil to Sinjar. The resulting firmāns deeply impacted Yazidi collective memory and identity. Based upon the work of locals and Western travellers, as well as the narratives of contemporary observers and researchers, the firman, its effects on the Yazidis, and their subsequent reactions to it, are described and analyzed in this study.
The Yazidis are an ethno-religious minority with ancestral roots in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Today, the majority of Yazidis live in disputed areas in northern Iraq, specifically in the Shaykhan and Sinjarª districts, with smaller communities present in Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, and Russia, as well as a diaspora population in Western countries. Their numbers are difficult to estimate, with semi-official estimates of Yazidis living in Iraq approximated to be 400,000-500,000.5 Based on misinterpretations, stereotypes,
and false information about the Yazidis' religion, especially by their Muslim neighbours such as the Sunni Kurdish Muslims and Turks, the Yazidi people have long been persecuted as devil worshippers across the region and subjected to at least seventy-two firmāns (pogroms or genocides) during the Ottoman Empire.
Although the number of firmans against the Yazidis is impossible to know, Yazidi tradition claims that the minority has endured seventy-two firmáns throughout history, which are recognized by Yazidis as genocides and massacres, and thus the number seventy-two has gained a symbolic meaning. The discrepancy in enumerating the pogroms comes from a number of recent events that are sometimes added to the list, such as the terrorist attack of 2007 when cars bombs exploded in the centre of Til-Izir and Siba-Shikhdr towns, killing around 800 Yazidis. On that basis, the ISIS attack on Yazidis in August 2014 would be considered the seventy-fourth firmān. [1]