The Yezidi community in Germany remembers the 336 dead – Head of the Yezidi expected from Iraq

The Yezidi living in Germany are commemorating this Saturday in Lollar near Giessen the victims of the dreadful attack at Sinjar in the north-west of Iraq, in which one year ago 336 Yezidi were killed and 1000 families made homeless. The Society of the Yezidi living in Giessen, which is organising the memorial service, is expecting hundreds of Yezidi from all over Germany, many Christian and Moslem guests and as an outstanding participant the temporal head of the Yezidi from Iraq, Mir Tahsim Saeed Beg.

In the attack on 14th August 2007 two Yezidi estates were completely destroyed. Moslem terrorists had filled several lorries with explosives, one of which was disguised as a water-carrier, driven them into the two towns and set them off simultaneously.

The Yezidi are a religious minority among the Kurds, who are for the most part Moslems. They are a religious community, which is thousands of years old and neither Christian nor Islamic, speaking a Kurmanci dialect of Kurdish. Their total number is estimated by the Society for Threatened Peoples at approximately 800,000 in the Near-East and in the European diaspora. Most of them live in the north of Iraq, where there are some 550,000. In Armenia there are about 18,000 Yezidi, in Syria about 5,000 and in Georgia still 1,200. The approximately 50,000 Yezidi living in Germany came mostly as religious refugees from Turkey. Their number there today is estimated at something above 400.

In the north-west Iraqi mountainous region of Sinjar the Yezidi make up with about 400,000 about 80% of the population. The roads leading from the province of Mosul to this north-western mountainous region are mostly blocked or only passable at risk of death. The only link which offers a degree of safety runs through Dohuk and Al-Rabia, although here too the threat of attack by Islamist terrorists is increasing.

The memorial service takes place on Saturday, 16.08.2008 and begins at 15.30 in the Justus-Killian-Str. 25 in 35457 Lollar near Giessen.