Yazidis.info is an independent reference project dedicated to helping readers understand Yazidi history, religion, culture, society, lived experience, and contemporary issues through carefully sourced information.
Our purpose is documentation and explanation—not representation.
Yazidis.info is not a Yazidi organisation, religious institution, political body, advocacy group, or community authority. We do not claim to speak for Yazidis, define Yazidi identity, interpret Yazidi religion on behalf of believers, or determine which community perspectives are authoritative.
Instead, our role is to make reliable information easier to find, understand, compare, and verify.
Why This Project Exists
Information about the Yazidis has often been shaped by outsiders.
Older scholarship, travel writing, journalism, political narratives, and popular culture have sometimes repeated misunderstandings or presented complex Yazidi beliefs through categories that do not reflect how Yazidis describe themselves. Academic reference works themselves note the long history of outsiders mischaracterizing Yazidi religion and emphasize the importance of Yazidi oral religious traditions in understanding the community.
The events beginning in Sinjar in August 2014 brought unprecedented international attention to the Yazidis. That attention produced important documentation, but it also created a tendency to describe an ancient and living community almost exclusively through genocide, displacement, captivity, and victimhood.
The genocide is an essential part of contemporary Yazidi history and must be documented accurately. In its final investigations, the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that ISIL committed genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against the Yazidi community.
But Yazidi history did not begin in 2014, and Yazidi identity cannot be reduced to what ISIS did to the community.
Yazidis.info therefore aims to provide broader context: religion and religious tradition, sacred places, historical communities, language, oral literature, social institutions, migration, diaspora life, scholarship, persecution, cultural change, and debates about identity.
Our Source Standard
Every substantive factual claim published on Yazidis.info should be traceable to a named, identifiable source.
Depending on the subject, our sources may include:
- academic monographs from established scholarly publishers;
- peer-reviewed journal articles;
- university research projects;
- United Nations reports and investigations;
- documentation from reputable human-rights and humanitarian organisations;
- government and intergovernmental records;
- archival collections;
- historical primary sources;
- recorded Yazidi oral traditions and community publications;
- interviews, testimonies, and first-person accounts when their provenance is clear.
Yazidi religious knowledge has historically relied heavily on oral transmission. Sacred hymns known as qawls, for example, occupy an important place in Yazidi religious tradition and were traditionally transmitted orally by specialist reciters. This means that written academic literature cannot automatically be treated as the only legitimate form of evidence about Yazidi belief or practice.
Sources are therefore evaluated according to what they are capable of establishing.
A nineteenth-century traveller may be useful as evidence of what an outsider observed or believed at a particular time. That does not necessarily make the traveller an authority on Yazidi theology.
A scholar may offer a historical interpretation. That interpretation should not automatically be presented as the community’s own understanding.
A Yazidi religious or community source may explain an internal tradition. That should be identified as a community perspective rather than transformed into an external academic conclusion.
Attribution matters.
When Sources Disagree
We do not hide legitimate disagreement behind a single confident sentence.
If significant scholars propose different explanations for the origin of a tradition, term, institution, or historical development, we identify the disagreement and, whenever practical, name the scholars or works involved.
If evidence is uncertain, we describe it as uncertain.
If a claim is disputed, we label it as disputed.
If an interpretation has changed over time, we explain that development.
This is particularly important in Yazidi studies, where questions of religious origins, identity, terminology, historical continuity, and the interpretation of oral traditions can involve competing scholarly and community perspectives.
Academic Interpretation and Yazidi Understanding
A central editorial principle of Yazidis.info is the distinction between what researchers say about Yazidis and what Yazidis say about themselves.
Sometimes those perspectives overlap.
Sometimes they do not.
When a community understanding differs from an academic interpretation, our goal is not to silently choose one and present it as unquestioned fact. Where reliable documentation allows, we present both and clearly identify which perspective each represents.
Research focused on contemporary Yazidi life increasingly recognizes the importance of examining lived experience and perspectives within the community rather than treating Yazidis only as objects of external observation.
That distinction is especially important when discussing religious beliefs, identity, social customs, sacred narratives, and terminology.
Corrections From Yazidi Readers
Corrections from Yazidi readers receive priority in our editorial queue.
That does not mean every submitted interpretation can automatically replace documented evidence. It means that when a Yazidi reader identifies a possible factual error, mistranslation, misleading description, inappropriate terminology, missing community perspective, or misuse of a religious concept, we treat the issue seriously and review it promptly.
Where appropriate, we will:
- correct factual errors;
- clarify ambiguous wording;
- add missing context;
- distinguish local practices from community-wide practices;
- separate academic interpretation from community understanding;
- update outdated information;
- add stronger or more appropriate sources.
We welcome corrections supported by published sources, community documentation, linguistic knowledge, or clearly explained first-hand expertise.
We Do Not Claim Community Authority
Yazidis.info should never be mistaken for an official voice of the Yazidi community.
We are not affiliated with the Yazidi religious leadership, Lalish institutions, Yazidi political organisations, survivor organisations, diaspora associations, or any government unless a specific relationship is explicitly disclosed.
Mentioning or citing an organisation does not imply endorsement by that organisation.
Likewise, the existence of different political, regional, linguistic, religious, generational, and diaspora perspectives within Yazidi communities means that no independent reference site should casually claim that there is one universal community position on every question.
Our responsibility is narrower: document carefully, attribute precisely, distinguish evidence from interpretation, and correct mistakes when they are found.
Beyond a History of Persecution
Yazidi history includes repeated persecution, and the crimes committed by ISIS remain central to any responsible contemporary reference work. United Nations investigations have also documented the destruction of Yazidi religious and cultural sites alongside crimes against Yazidi civilians.
But Yazidis.info also seeks to document what violence cannot adequately describe:
religious traditions, sacred poetry, festivals, family and community life, places such as Lalish and Sinjar, historical migrations, language, memory, music, scholarship, diaspora communities, cultural continuity, and the ways Yazidis themselves understand their past and present.
A community should not be remembered only through the attempts made to destroy it.
Our Commitment
Yazidis.info is built around a simple editorial standard:
Source the claim. Name the perspective. Acknowledge disagreement. Correct the record.
We will not always get everything right. Yazidi history and religion are complex, sources can conflict, terminology changes, archives remain incomplete, and scholarship continues to develop.
What we can promise is a method.
We will seek evidence before certainty.
We will distinguish documentation from interpretation.
We will identify our sources.
We will make disagreements visible rather than erase them.
And when Yazidi readers tell us that we have represented something inaccurately, we will listen, investigate, and correct the page when the evidence supports a correction.
Yazidis.info is a reference project about the Yazidis. It is not a substitute for Yazidi voices. Whenever possible, it should help readers find those voices more clearly.