Eugene Robinson: In Iraq, Shattering Villages And Illusions

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/16/AR2007081601686.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

In Iraq, Shattering Villages and Illusions

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, August 17, 2007; Page A23

The next time you hear confident assurances from the White House and its supporters that the "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq is working and that something called "victory" is within sight, remember the Yazidis.

The who? Before Tuesday, you almost certainly would have asked that question -- before two villages in northern Iraq, populated by an obscure religious sect, suffered what is now officially the deadliest terrorist attack of the war, with more than 400 people confirmed dead. The final toll is expected to rise, but the coordinated suicide truck bombings in the Yazidi towns already constitute the second-worst terrorist attack of modern times, trailing only the carnage of Sept. 11, 2001.

Thanks to online encyclopedias, veteran foreign correspondents and the work of dedicated scholars, we now have a boilerplate definition. The Yazidis are ethnic Kurds who practice an ancient, pre-Islamic religion. Among their beliefs is that God created seven archangels, one of whom is sometimes called Shaytan, which is the name given to Satan in the Koran. This has led some Muslims to believe, incorrectly, that the Yazidis are devil worshipers.

We also now know that in April, a 17-year-old Yazidi girl who had married a Muslim and converted to Islam was stoned to death by irate members of her community. This was captured on video and disseminated widely; angry Muslims gunned down 23 Yazidis in reprisal. We can state these facts with confidence. But the truth is that we have only the most superficial idea of who the Yazidis are -- and even less of a clue about who might have visited such utter devastation on their villages.

It was al-Qaeda, U.S. military officers quickly announced. And maybe it was. Maybe it was part of an al-Qaeda effort to create chaos in an area near the Kurdish-controlled provinces that are often held up as the great success story of the U.S. invasion -- an oasis of relative peace and tranquility if you want to overlook episodes of friction between Yazidis and Sunni Muslim Kurds. But the White House and the U.S. military leadership in Iraq generally blame al-Qaeda for trying to foment sectarian and ethnic violence by driving wedges between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. In that context, the Yazidi sect is so tiny as to be inconsequential -- hardly worth al-Qaeda's time and effort.

The bombings Tuesday looked more like an act of genocide, an attempt to erase as many Yazidis as possible from the face of the earth.

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