How are Iraq's Yazidis faring amid Kurds' confrontations?
Turkey’s bombing of Yazidis' Sinjar homeland deepened the argument between the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Kurdistan Workers Party.
The Islamic State (IS) genocidal invasion in 2014 of the Yazidi homeland in Sinjar, Iraq, and recent Turkish air attacks have deepened fissures in the Kurdish political map. Forces are playing two Kurdish segments against each other: the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which Turkey considers a terrorist group, and the Turkey-friendly Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The Yazidis are caught in the middle. Ethnically, Yazidis are Kurds, but for centuries their religion has set them apart and made them targets for persecution.
After the 2003 collapse of Saddam Hussein's Baath Regime in Iraq, the Yazidis faced the choice of joining the administrative boundaries of Kurdistan or seeking an autonomous entity for themselves. The KRG, which deployed its peshmerga in the disputed area after the 2003 US occupation, sees Sinjar as part of its territory. But in 2014, when 7,000 KRG peshmerga forces withdrew from Sinjar instead of battling IS — leaving the Yazidis to suffer massacres at the hands of IS — the PKK’s popularity saw a meteoric rise.
