World’s largest Yazidi temple “Quba Heft Merê Dîwanê u Tawûsê Melek” opens in Armenia, Yerevan, September 29, 2019. Photo: Ararat Mirzoyan’s FB
YEREVAN,— The world’s largest Yazidi temple was opened Sunday in Armenia, where the ethnoreligious group are the largest minority, in a ceremony attended by the deputy prime minister and other Yerevan officials.
Located in Aknalich, 35 kilometers west of the capital city of Yerevan, Quba Heft Merê Dîwanê u Tawûsê Melek consists of seven domes surrounding a central, arched roof, and houses a prayer hall, a seminary, and a museum.
First deputy Prime Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan used the occasion to draw comparisons between the tragic recent histories of Yazidis and Armenians.
“Unfortunately, in their modern history, Yazidis like Armenians have also fallen victim to genocide,” Mirzoyan said in a Sunday statement.
“It is symbolic and logical that the largest Yazidi temple in the world is in Armenia. Armenia is home to the Yazidi people. The children of the Yazidi people have been alongside their Armenian brothers for many fatal and heroic moments,” he added.
World’s largest Yazidi temple “Quba Heft Merê Dîwanê u Tawûsê Melek” opens in Armenia, Yerevan, September 29, 2019. Photo: Ararat Mirzoyan’s FB
Quba Heft Merê Dîwanê was built just a few meters away from Ziarat, Armenia’s first Yazidi temple established in 2012. Funded by Armenian-born, Russia-based Yazidi businessman Mirza Sloian, the new, 25 meter-tall temple towers over its humble predecessor.
In August 2014, the Islamic State ISIS militants attacked the Sinjar district in northwest Iraq, which was home to hundreds of thousands of Yazidis, after Massoud Barzani’s KDP militia forces withdrew from the area without a fight leaving behind the Yazidi civilians to IS killing and genocide.
Thousands of Yazidi families fled to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped in it and suffered from significant lack of water and food, killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidis as well as rape and captivity of thousands of women.
Thousands of Yazidi women were raped and murdered, with many of the survivors sold into sexual slavery and taken away to other parts of Iraq, Syria, and even further afield. Men and boys were systematically murdered, forced to work for the group, or coerced into becoming child soldiers.
It is estimated that 3,000 Yazidis were killed over a period of several days and 6,800 others were abducted.
Although several thousand Yazidis have been rescued over the last four-and-a-half years, another 3,000 remain missing, according to official statistics.
Most of the Yazidi people lost faith in the ruling Barzani family when the KDP Peshmerga forces failed to protect them from Islamic State in 2014 which lead to the genocide of the Yazidis in Sinjar district in northwest Iraq.
Many Yazidis, critics, Kurdish politicians and observers blame ex-Kurdistan president Massoud Barzani, the commander in-chief of the Peshmerga, for the Yazidi massacre.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish speaking religious group linked to Zoroastrianism and Sufism. The religious has roots that date back to ancient Mesopotamia, are considered heretics by the hard-line Islamic State group.
Some 600,000 Yazidis live in villages in Iraqi Kurdistan region and in Kurdish areas outside Kurdistan region in around Mosul in Nineveh province, with additional communities in Transcaucasia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and Syria. Since the 1990s, the Yazidis have emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany. There are almost 1.5 million Yazidis worldwide.
Yazidi figures and advocacy groups have said temples like Armenia’s Quba Heft Merê Dîwanê and the holy site of Lalish in Iraqi Kurdistan region, which is currently undergoing restoration, act as sites of permanence amidst waves of displacement and help protect the group’s distinct cultural and religious practices from destruction.
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