Proposed Blasphemy Law and Kurdistan’s Religious Diversity

By Hermione Gee ("Rudaw," June 28, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37601/

Erbil, Kurdistan Region - Head north out of Erbil towards the international airport and just as you leave the city limits you arrive in the small suburb of Ainkawa.

A neon crucifix emerging over the rooftops announces the area’s Christian affiliation – Ainkawa’s population of 40,000 is mostly made up of Assyrians and Chaldean Catholics, as well as a small number of Yazidis, an ethno-religious group indigenous to the Kurdish region.

In contrast to the wide avenues of downtown Erbil, Ainkawa’s narrow crisscrossing streets give it a village-like atmosphere. Also unlike Erbil, beer, wine and liquor are freely available at any one of the many bars and liquor stores, where brightly colored icons of Jesus and assorted Christian saints watch over the customers.

Father Ninos Esho is a priest at St. John the Baptist Assyrian church in Ainkawa, a domed brick building set in the middle of a wide sunny courtyard. Esho came to Kurdistan in 2007 after fleeing his home in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood to escape persecution by Muslim extremists.

“You would wake up in the morning and find bodies on the street – the bodies of Christians and people who had worked with the government or with the US army,” Esho recalls. “We weren’t allowed to cover them up or take them away, so the children would be playing in the street right next to the bodies while the dogs would be eating the corpses.”

Since 2003, thousands of Christians have fled Southern and Central Iraq to the Kurdish Region. It’s a world away from the sectarian violence so prevalent in other parts of the country, Esho says. “We found peace here in Kurdistan. We are living in peace with the other religious groups.”

Islamic Spring

“We do our best not to let anyone play with religion in Kurdistan,” explains Sozan Şahab, a member of parliament for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). “We don’t need that problem. We have a bigger problem – we are Kurds without a state and have to contend with the political system ruling Iraq.”

But things are starting to change, she says. “After the Arab Spring comes the Islamic Spring. It’s in the region, in the atmosphere. The mullahs have changed.”

And while, to date, Kurdistan’s three Islamic parties have only 12 seats in parliament, she says, “they use the mullahs and the mullahs use the people.”

The mullahs, Şahab says, preach against other religious groups during their Friday sermons. “They don’t give the message clearly but they speak against alcohol when the only people who sell alcohol are non-Muslims. It’s a way of saying ‘Christian’ without using the word.”

And on May 8th of this year, one of those sermons led to hundreds of people taking to the streets of Erbil in protest of an article in the Chirpa magazine, which some local imams condemned as blasphemous.

The demonstrators threw stones at police, and attacked a liquor store, television station, and social center, as well as a guardhouse outside the parliament.

Security forces reacted quickly to quell the violence, dispersing the crowd and arresting protestors, journalists and five members of the Kurdistan Islamic Group who were charged with organizing an illegal rally.

The government responded equally speedily to pacify the underlying tensions that led to the outburst of violence.

Chirpa had already been closed down and its editor arrested on charges of “violating religious sensibilities,” so Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani proposed the introduction of a blasphemy law that would “prevent any further offensive acts against any religion.”

Blasphemy bill

Currently being drafted by a parliamentary committee, the bill would make acts of blasphemy – broadly defined as offending God or the prophets, deliberately damaging holy books or religious buildings – against any religion punishable by up to ten years in prison. Any media organization found guilty of publishing or broadcasting blasphemous content will be closed down for a minimum of six months.

“This is idiotic,” Şahab says, as she leafs through the latest draft of the bill, “I don’t like it. It’s against free speech. We don’t have media censorship here in Kurdistan.”

But proponents of the bill such as Dr. Basher Hadad, a member of the Kurdistani bloc in the regional parliament and head of the Endowment Committee charged with drafting the bill, deny that the new law would amount to censorship.

“It isn’t prohibiting any freedom. You’re free to say your opinion; you’re free to criticize mullahs, scholars, Islam, the history of Islam. If you go to the universities, to the market, you’ll see a lot of books that criticize religion, that criticize Islam. There’s nothing wrong with that because they present their views in a logical and rational way. What’s not OK and what’s not allowed is insulting Islam.”

Hadad cites examples where people compared God to a pimp and minarets to penises. “That’s not criticism,” he says, “it’s pure humiliation. If anyone says that is freedom of speech, then we don’t want that kind freedom in Kurdistan.”

The law, Hadad stresses, applies to all religions equally. “The name of Islam is not mentioned in this law. What it does prohibit – insulting God, the prophets, holy books – is common to all religions. This law prohibits Muslims from insulting Christians, Yazidi or other religious minorities, too.”

Discrimination

Outside the safe haven of Ainkawa, life isn’t always so easy for religious minorities in Kurdistan, says Dr. Mammou Othman, Director of the European Studies Center at the University of Duhok and a prominent member of Kurdistan’s Yazidi community.

“We are the younger brothers,” he explains. “We live here together but [the Muslims] say ‘I am the older brother and you should follow my instructions. I have the power because my religion is more acknowledged than yours.’”

And this despite the fact that Yazidis inhabited the northern provinces of Kurdistan long before Islam arrived, Othman says.

“We feel like the first true natives of this country. Nobody is connected to the country like the Yazidi -- all our rituals are here, our main shrine is here. That’s why the Yazidi believes he is part of this soil, this earth.” He says.

Today, Othman explains, Yazidis are the “underdogs” of the society, seen literally as devil worshippers by many Muslims due to their reverence for Tawûsê Melek, who in Islam represents the Fallen Angel – Satan.

There are also political reasons the Yazidis earned the antipathy of Iraq’s Kurds, Othman explains.

“During the Baath regime, the Yazidi [living in the country’s disputed areas of Mosul and Sinjar] were obliged to register themselves as Arabs to get benefits from the government, to not be persecuted, not to be displaced from the area as part of the Arabization process. So some people still believe that Yazidi are opportunists because when they want to they are Arabs, and when they want to they are Kurds.”

And although the Yazidi community is doing what it can to dispel this negative image, “we cannot do it alone,” says Dr. Othman. “We need assistance from the NGOs, from good friends, from Islam, to remove these misconceptions about Yazidism.”

The proposed blasphemy law, however, won’t help, he says. Laws are already in place to protect all citizens and religious institutions from attack and the government does apply them, Othman affirms. After an angry Muslim mob attacked Christian and Yazidi-owned liquor stores, hotels and a massage parlor in the northern city of Zhako last year, he points out, the perpetrators were arrested, as were those responsible for last month’s attacks in Erbil.

“I think the government is working well, they are punishing them, they are treating them like citizens, not according to the instruction of their religion.” Othman says.

Where the government is falling short, he says, is in its lack of inclusiveness.

“We don’t have access. Why don’t we have a single director in the governorate of Duhok or Sulaimani who’s Yazidi? It’s not because we’re not qualified. The system is very partisan and party representatives meet [Prime Minister] Barzani once a month. A lot of them are Muslims and some of them are Christians; they put forward their demands but not the Yazidi. We are not part of that.” He adds.

And the new law, Sozan Şahab argues, “is not about preventing discrimination – it’s about protecting religion. The real issue is how to create a code of respect and it’s not the job of the government to change the mentality of people. You have to work on it through education.”

“It’s useless to try to change laws or amend the constitution,” Othman concurs. “The most important thing is to implement a mechanism starting with primary school through to the universities. Change the curriculum; create awareness within the family also. Create awareness that we should not mingle the principles of our religion with our duties as a citizen. We need about 20 years and within that time we can change all the society.”

“What about us?”

But until that happens, says Dr. Haddad, Kurdistan’s Muslims also need to be protected – both from those who want to insult them but also from the more extreme Islamic factions who instigated May’s protests:

“Meanwhile, what about us? Those instances could be repeated – there are people who are practicing religion in a more violent way and we want to put an end to that. I don’t want [anyone] to think that Kurdistan has become a conflict arena between religious and secularists – this is very limited. Very few people knowingly or unknowingly [insult Islam] and there are a few people who respond to that insult in a violent way but to regulate those cases, we want to have this bill.” Dr. Hadad says.

A draft of the proposed blasphemy law has been submitted to parliament and is currently pending review. Dr. Haddad says he hopes his committee will be able to come up with something that is acceptable to both sides:

“We don’t want to implement medieval practices and impose them on people. And we don’t want the non-religious people to say, ‘This place is only for us, religious people should not exist.’ We should co-exist with each other. If you’re not practicing religion, that’s fine. Let me practice it. We should respect each other.”

And that, says Mammou Othman is part of the region’s identity: “We should live with each other peacefully, cooperatively. This country, this earth doesn’t only belong to one group, it belongs to all of them. Barzani’s father once said, ‘Kurdistan is like a wreath of flowers – if you separate them, they’re not as good as they are together.’”

Yazidis risk persecution, attacks to follow religion

By Julia Duin ("Washington Times," August 22, 2007)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/25982/

Washington, USA - Travel anywhere in northern Iraq, and you will see them: small, white, conical shrines that sit alone in the fields, along with the sheep. Inside, the floors are greasy, covered with drippings from oil lamps. There are low-lying altars for the occasional animal sacrifice. The doorways are low, making one bow toward the altar upon entering.

These are the khalwas — temples for the Yazidi, an ethnic-Kurdish group that practices a religion that is a mixture of Islam, Zoroastrianism, gnosticism, Judaism, Sufism and shamanism.

Their highly syncretistic beliefs — including a veneration of Lucifer as a redeemed archangel — have earned them the reputation as devil worshippers, a concept loathed by the Muslim populace.

The Muslim suicide bombers who killed at least 400 Yazidis Aug. 14 were acting on a centuries-old mutual loathing.

The Yazidi faith predates Islam, but it derives its name from Yezid or Yazid, a seventh-century Umayyad caliph, or spiritual leader. The faith is based at Lalish, a town 15 miles north of Mosul, the site of a tomb of a 12th-century Yazidi mystic, Sheik Adi. All Yazidis are encouraged to make pilgrimages there every fall.

The religion retains some of the fire rituals and prayers toward the sun derived from the fire-worshipping Zoroastrians. Yazidis believe that Lucifer, after he fell, repented and was restored by God to his previous position as chief of all the angels. They now liken him to a peacock and call him Melek Taus, the peacock angel. Yazidis also venerate depictions of serpents.

Melek Taus, in Yazidi cosmology, is somewhat like the Christians' Archangel Michael, ruling over other angels. Yazidis believe Melek Taus and six other angelic beings rule the universe for God, who they say has no direct hand in the running of the affairs of the planets and the stars. They do not believe in sin or hell, nor in the devil, making Muslims' depiction of them as devil worshippers doubly ironic.

The sect avoids any contact with the color blue, which is apparently specific to the peacock angel. There are food taboos: Lettuce is especially forbidden, as Yazidis believe evil can be found in it. Some also forbid fish, squash, okra, beans and cabbage.

Their theology says all Yazidis are descendants of Adam, but not Eve. Both Adam and Eve, they say, were given seed with which to have children, but only Adam's produced a child. That boy married a houri — one of the beautiful virgins of the Koranic paradise — and so began the Yazidi race. They also believe in reincarnation, and they have a caste system within their own ranks. Their children are baptized at birth, and the boys are circumcised.

Most Yazidis are shepherds and very poor, living in isolated villages on the Nineveh plain. Two such villages, Bozan and Kendala, visited by this reporter in 2004, were located on arid, rocky terrain. They only had ruined shells for schools, and village leaders begged for American help in rebuilding them.

They occupy a position similar to the Druze in Lebanon and Israel, as both have secretive religions, both are religious minorities and neither group intermarries with other religions. One cannot convert into the Yazidi religion; one must be born into it.

Yazidis and their fellow Muslim Kurds share the same mountainous regions in Iraq, Turkey, Armenia and Syria. There are roughly 1 million Yazidis in the world, according to a briefing paper distributed by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Most other estimates number them between 200,000 and 300,000. An estimated 70,000 Yazidis live in Europe — mostly in Germany — and about 450 to 500 are scattered across the United States.

More Yazidis are emigrating because of the bleak situation faced by religious minorities all over the Nineveh province, which surrounds Mosul. Before being fatally shot June 7, Sahar al-Haideri, who was a Mosul-based reporter for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, said a number of communities face constant threats there. Other groups are Assyrian Christians and Shabaks — a group of 400,000 Iraqis who practice a derivative of Islam and whose language is a mix of Kurdish, Farsi, Turkish and Arabic.

Yazidis have especially been targeted at Mosul University, which has taken on an extremist Islamic tone, Mrs. al-Haideri wrote. One Yazidi lecturer, who has since quit, told reporters he feared for his life, as the university has taken no steps to protect minorities on campus.

"I'm going to get out of Iraq and go to any country where Yazidis are not killed," said Atto Sa'ed, 45. "Here in Mosul, Yazidi blood is cheap, and no one defends their rights."

Unlike the Sunni Kurds, religious minority groups in northern Iraq have no militias to protect them, leaving them wide open for attack. Their homes and land can be taken with impunity.

One of Mrs. al-Haideri's last stories was on how the genesis of the current Yazidi-Sunni conflict began in April. A 17-year-old Yazidi girl from the village of Bashiqa, 21 miles east of Mosul, had announced her plans to marry a Sunni man.

Not only does the Yazidi religion not allow marriage outside the faith, leaving the religion incurs harsh penalties.

Finally, the girl, Duaa Khalil Aswad, converted to Islam, with the grudging consent of her parents. When her tribe learned of the matter, the girl fled to the home of a Yazidi cleric, in fear for her life. When some of her uncles came to the cleric's home on April 7 to say the tribe had forgiven her and wanted her to return home, she believed them.

No sooner had she gotten a few yards outside the house when a crowd of Yazidis, including 13 of her cousins, surrounded her, forced her to the ground, then dropped large concrete blocks on her. For the next two hours, they beat and stoned her to death while other members of the mob cheered and filmed the killing on their cell phones. Local police as well as members of the Kurdish militia stood by, doing nothing.

When footage of the murder began surfacing on the Internet, the local Muslim community arose in outrage, calling the girl "our martyred sister." This was not the first time a girl had been killed for leaving the Yazidi faith; a few months before, another girl who had converted to Islam was shot in the head by her family, Mrs. al-Haideri wrote.

Retaliation came swiftly: On April 22, a busload of 23 Yazidi textile workers were executed by Sunni gunmen in eastern Mosul; on April 26, a Yazidi baker and three of his helpers were killed; then, on Aug. 14, suicide bombers targeted two Yazidi villages 70 miles west of Mosul, killing about 400 people.

Yazidis say they are hemmed in on one side by insurgents and on the other by their fellow Muslim Kurds, who are also quick to disenfranchise them. Yazidis, along with the Assyrian Christians, complained bitterly during the January 2005 elections that the Kurdistan Democratic Party confiscated their ballot boxes. The same thing happened during subsequent elections in October and December 2005.

"The disenfranchised minorities had learned, however, from their experience in January 2005 that filing complaints and making direct appeals for assistance with the U.S. government produces no response," said Michael Youash, director of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project, during a USCIRF hearing July 25 on Capitol Hill. "Instead, one is left alone, with those who perpetrated the crimes and have the means and the will to inflict grave harm.

"Minorities learned that standing up for their rights to vote with U.S. or Iraqi authorities only exposes them to greater persecution. Better to stay quiet. Yet the Department of State interprets this [silence] as an improvement. How wrong."

Beliefs Endure as Believers Move On

By Karl Vick ("Washington Post," April 5, 2005)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/16270/?&place=turkey&section=miscellaneous

Midyat, Turkey - On the day the genies show up, seemingly everyone in this historic town in southeastern Turkey heads for the door.

"On Black Wednesdays, you have to go to picnics and stay outdoors," said Summeyye Saltik, 15, on the playground of the local primary school where attendance dipped, as it always does, on the second Wednesday in March. "If you're indoors, genies will visit your house."

Children in Midyat raise hands to indicate if they believe genies visit local houses. The belief is one of the last cultural remnants of the Yazidis, most of whom have left the town.

"Because the houses used to belong to them and they come to claim them," added a classmate, Bushra Gokce.

"They can be anybody," explained a third girl, Serap Ceylan. "They can be Muslims or anybody who lived here before."

That makes the possibilities almost endless in Midyat, which over the centuries has been inhabited or visited by people of a vast assortment of faiths, including the Yazidis, the obscure sect that introduced the town to the springtime escapes of Black Wednesday.

But while the Yazidi wariness of house-haunting genies has spread to many other groups in the area, the number of Yazidis has dwindled considerably. Of about 5,600 Yazidis who lived in the area in the 1980s, only 15 are left.

Midyat, a town that predates Christianity and Islam, once reflected the deep diversity of a region where faiths overlapped and conquering armies advanced and retreated. Scholars say its very name may be a mix of Farsi, Arabic and Assyrian that translates as "mirror."

But what this town of 57,000 reflects these days is a growing sameness. The Armenian Christians who built many of the old city's medieval stone buildings disappeared in the early 20th-century conflict that Armenians and many historians have called genocide. The Assyrian Christians who long accounted for the majority in Midyat have been reduced to just 100 families.

As for the Yazidis: "They were not causing any problems, but it was still better that they left," said Nazete Koksal, an ethnic Kurd seated on a sofa under the arched stone roof of a house her husband, an Arab, bought from a Yazidi family.

"They're dirty," Koksal said. "Their religion is dirty. They pray to the devil. We pray to God."

Still, she expressed some nostalgia for the days before so many groups fled her city. "Before they left, we used to be friends," she said.

In some ways, present-day Midyat reflects the founding principles of modern Turkey. Rising from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic sultanate that tolerated religious minorities as second-class citizens, the Turkish republic was founded on a fierce assertion of national identity. The concept of Turkishness rooted the new nation-state firmly in the hills of the Anatolian peninsula once known as Asia Minor. But it also denied the notion of any other identity existing there.

More than 80 years after the republic was formed, anti-minority feelings can run close to the surface. Last year, an ultranationalist literally tore to pieces a human rights report on minorities before television cameras. In eastern Turkey this month, unemployed youths were hired to portray Armenians in a civic skit depicting a conflict with Turks that was more even-handed than history suggests; municipal workers reportedly had refused to take part.

Here in the southeast, official policy meant people who spoke Kurdish and called themselves Kurds were, officially, "Mountain Turks." Their eventual insistence on maintaining their ethnic Kurdish identity helped spark a separatist war that killed 30,000 people, most of them Kurdish civilians, during the 1990s.

The conflict took a toll on other minorities as well.

Children in Midyat raise hands to indicate if they believe genies visit local houses. The belief is one of the last cultural remnants of the Yazidis, most of whom have left the town.

"We tried to be out of it," said Isa Dogdu, an Assyrian standing in the doorway of a church that dates from the 7th century. As a religious minority, however, the Assyrians felt pressure both from the Kurdish guerrillas and from Turkish Hezbollah, radical Islamic guerrillas whom the government secretly armed as a proxy force. When government officials showed up at the church, said Dogdu, a religious instructor, they asked why young people in its annex were not being taught in Turkish. Assyrians, who in the 1st century formed the world's first Christian community, still learn a version of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.

Persecution, Dogdu said, "was not done very openly, but sometimes it was deliberate. For instance, there were some murders of prominent persons. If you murder a prominent person, other people have fear."

Today, about 500 Assyrians live in Midyat. Sunday services rotate among the four churches that remain in the medieval splendor of the old city. In recent months, small groups of Assyrians have begun returning from abroad to build homes, mostly in isolated villages. But Dogdu's weary smile suggested the downward trend would not be easily reversed.

"When you have a majority population and it goes down to less than 1 percent, what do you think?" he said.

The exodus of the Yazidis was more stark. By official count, Turkey had 22,632 members of the sect in 1985. Fifteen years later, their numbers had dropped to 423. In the area around Midyat, the exodus was even more dramatic.

"In the last 20 years, everybody moved," said Mostafa Demir, 22, whose family left Midyat in 1990. "Nobody was really telling them to leave, but the relations were not that warm."

Centuries ago, Muslims slaughtered Yazidis by the thousands as devil worshipers. Yazidis, whose faith draws on several sources, including Zoroastrianism, believe the fallen angel who became Satan later repented, returning to grace after extinguishing the fires of Hell. Yazidis envision him as a peacock, a main symbol of their religion.

In modern Midyat, Demir said, their persecution was more apt to appear as mockery. Demir recalled merchants at the town market drawing a circle in the dirt around Yazidi customers. Yazidis, whose theology does not allow them to break a circle, would stand there indefinitely.

But things grew worse when the Kurdish rebellion erupted. Many Yazidis, who claim to speak the purest Kurdish, identified with the rebels. That made them targets of Turkish troops and Hezbollah, who "pushed the Yazidis out of here to get their lands," said Fars Bakir, an elderly Yazidi who lives in a mud-daubed house in a hamlet called Cilesiz, or "Without Suffering," in a lush valley bordering Syria.

As a condition for joining the European Union, Turkey recently passed new legal protections for minorities. But Bakir, who fled to Germany for several years, said he and his wife came home primarily because of homesickness, not faith in new laws.

Turkey differs with the European Union on the definition of minority, insisting on its definition of nationhood grounded in Turkishness. Baskin Oran, a University of Ankara political scientist active in minority human rights, discounted the new laws as "a revolution from above. It's more or less easy to change laws. But it is much more difficult to change the mentality of the people."

Iraqi group fears revival of 'devil-worship' tag

By Andrew Hammond (Reuters, August 18, 2005)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/18326/

Baghdad, Iraq - Fresh accusations that an ancient Iraqi sect worships the devil raises concerns about the future of religious minorities in the new Islamist-dominated Iraq, a presidential adviser said on Thursday.

Mirza Dinnayi, President Jalal Talabani's adviser for Yazidi affairs, said that despite efforts to ensure that minorities are protected in a new constitution being drafted in Baghdad, whisperings about the nature of the Yazidi faith had raised fears of violence against the community.

"As a liberal I find the future of Iraq miserable and for minorities like the Yazidis it will be even more difficult," said Dinnayi.

"I don't know if this new constitution will even be put into practice. Minorities have a great problem now," he added, speaking from Sulaimaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan, which has almost entirely been spared the sectarian violence tearing at Iraq.

Politicians in Baghdad are putting together a permanent constitution they hope will create a political system that allows Iraq's main ethnic and religious groups to live together after decades of Saddam Hussein's Baath party rule.

But minorities such as the esoteric pre-Islamic Kurdish sect fear they will be victims of the zealotry gripping the country.

Yazidis say they have often faced the charge because the chief angel they venerate as a manifestation of God is often identified as the fallen angel Satan in biblical terminology. They also believe God created good and evil in the world.

Their concerns were underlined last week when one of the three Yazidis in parliament tried to challenge the widespread perception among Islamists that they are friends of Satan.

He spoke of accusing looks he said were directed at Yazidis whenever ministers began speeches with Koranic verses cursing the devil.

But the press, including in Mosul where most Yazidis live, took the comment as a plea not to offend Yazidi veneration for their supposed idol. "They worship Lucifer and consider him head of the angels," al-Ittijah al-Akhar newspaper said this week.

Yazidi leaders, who say there have been a number of attacks on them since the 2003 U.S. invasion, say the incident bodes ill for the future in a country meant to be guided by democracy.

"While we are not devil worshippers, one has to take into account that people deride us as such," MP Adel Nasser said.

Yazidis say they suffered army massacres in their north Iraq villages during the secular rule of Saddam Hussein.

Now Sunni Islamist insurgents are strong in the Mosul region where most of the half a million Yazidis live.

Leading Christian Yonadem Kanna said he had personally written into the constitution a section that ensured freedoms for groups like Yazidis not considered "people of the book", a Koranic term referring to the main monotheistic religions.

"I wrote this by my own hand and they (Islamists) accepted that," he said.

Al-Qaida Kills Eight Times More Muslims Than Non-Muslims

By Yassin Musharbash ("Spiegel Online International," December 3, 2009)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/32066/

Washington, USA - Few would deny that Muslims too are victims of Islamist terror. But a new study by the Combating Terrorism Center in the US has shown that an overwhelming majority of al-Qaida victims are, in fact, co-religionists.

In the battle against unbelievers, can one also kill Muslims? Even the terror network al-Qaida is troubled by this question.

A leading al-Qaida ideologue for the terror network, Abu Yahya al-Libi, has developed his own theologically-based theory of collateral damage that allows militants to kill Muslims when it is unavoidable.

Even the Iraqi affiliates of Osama bin Laden's terror group, who are known to be particularly bloodthirsty, claim that they too consider this question. For instance, in a message claiming responsibility for an August attack in Baghdad, the group wished those Sunnis injured in the "operation" a speedy recovery and expressed their hope that those killed would be accepted by God as "martyrs."

But even as such apologetic communiqués from al-Qaida show the terror network stylizing itself as a defender of the true faith wrestling with religious concepts, they also make it look as though any dead Muslims are regretful but isolated cases. The facts, though, tell a different story.

Between 2004 and 2008, for example, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for 313 attacks, resulting in the deaths of 3,010 people. And even though these attacks include terrorist incidents in the West -- in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 -- only 12 percent of those killed (371 deaths) were Westerners.

New Report Shows Many More Muslims Killed Than Non-Muslims

It is, of course, no surprise that al-Qaida kills more Muslims than non-Muslims -- particularly for people in the Islamic world. But a new report by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at the United States' Military Academy at West Point in New York -- which has gathered together these and other relevant figures in one report ("Deadly Vanguards: A Study Of al-Qaida's Violence Against Muslims "), spells out the discrepancy in black and white.

The authors of the study admit that their report likely omits a number of Muslim victims. But that was the price of their rigorous methodology, used in an effort to avoid accusations of partisanship.

The researchers only counted the attacks for which al-Qaida claimed responsibility, thus preventing accusations that they were seeking to make al-Qaida look even worse than it is. Still, it is well known that al-Qaida does not claim responsibility for every attack perpetrated, meaning that many victims are likely left out of the report. Furthermore, the researchers only included attacks reported on by the Arab media and relied on the numbers they reported -- out of a conviction that the Arab media is more highly regarded in the Muslim world than the Western media. That, though, is not always the case.

Blurred Figures And Inexact Categories Are Problematic

The greatest potential for inaccuracy in the report, however, is the placing of victims into only one of two categories: Western or non-Western. The assumption being that Western would also mean non-Muslim and vice versa. The problems with such a system of categorization are myriad. Not all those living in the Muslim world are Muslim: In Iraq, al-Qaida has launched attacks against Kurds, Yazidi and Christians. Secondly, a lot of the Muslim victims are actually -- and deliberately -- Shiites. A Sunni group, al-Qaida considers the Shiites to be unbelievers.

Unfortunately news reports don't tend to differentiate between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, explains Scott Helfstein, one of the writers of the report. This is also the reason for the non-Western and Western categories. "It is easy for journalists to count nationality but they rarely, if ever, identify religion," Helfstein writes in reply to e-mailed questions from SPIEGEL ONLINE. The report's writers were well aware of the problem. "But we were not able to find a way around it," Helfstein notes.

Indeed, the report's authors confront the shortcomings of their methodology head on. In one passage, they remove attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan from their calculations altogether, resulting in the share of Westerners killed in al-Qaida attacks rising to a much more significant 39 percent. If one removes the Madrid and London attacks from the statistics, though, the share of murdered Westerners drops back down to 13 percent.

Perhaps more significantly, if one only examines attacks in 2007 and disregards those having been perpetrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the share of non-Westerners killed by al-Qaida rises to 99 percent. In 2008, it was 96 percent.

Non-Westerners 38 Times More Likely To Be Killed

Put another way, between 2006 and 2008, non-Westerners were 38 times more likely to be killed by an al-Qaida attack than Westerners.

"Since al-Qaida has limited capability to strike against its Western enemies, the group maintains its relevance by attacking countries with Muslim majorities," the study concludes.

The conclusions reached by Helfstein and his co-authors are hardly world changing. They are valuable nonetheless, in that they provide a numerical foundation to the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim al-Qaida victims.

Still, critics will no doubt point out that the study comes from the CTC, an organization that is part of an American military school. In recent years, the CTC has released a number of excellent studies on terrorism. But because it is actually supplying arguments, backed by scientific research, for the fight against terrorism to decision makers, politicians and military personnel in the US, it cannot be considered strictly neutral. That also applies to this case, especially since a number of American officials have recently begun stressing the point that al-Qaida is particularly violent toward Muslims and can now rely on solid data to back up their argument.

This perceived lack of neutrality doesn't change the fact that the fundamental findings of the report are correct and meaningful. The authors conclude that if they compare statistics for the years from 1995 to 2003 (excluding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the US as a solitary event), they find that al-Qaida is becoming more violent and "increasingly indiscriminate" in its attacks.

Just how big a problem this discrepancy between Muslim and non-Muslim victims will become for al-Qaida remains to be seen. Even prior to the report's release, however, it had become a subject of intense debate within the Jihadist seen -- with more and more ideologues coming to the conclusion that al-Qaida's fight on behalf of the downtrodden Muslims isn't worth it.

A Sect Shuns Lettuce and Gives the Devil His Due

By Neil MacFarquhar ("The New York times," January 3, 2003)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/6456/?&place=asia-pacific&section=miscellaneous

It proves tricky to extract a straight answer from the Yazidis when it comes to what, exactly, defines their sect.

Take their fierce prohibition against eating lettuce.

A man who teaches the Yazidi equivalent of Sunday school avoids the simple kind of explanation found in encyclopedias — that the process of fusing a smattering of faiths including Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam left the origins of many Yazidi practices obscure.

Instead, the teacher, Falah Hassan Juma, links the sect's lettuceless state to its long history of persecution by Muslims and Christians.

The caliphs of the Ottoman Empire carried out no fewer than 72 massacres against the Yazidis in the 18th and 19th centuries alone, he explained, with the faithful slain by the thousands in the lettuce fields then dotting northeastern Iraq.

Watching the blood of innocents gush into the greens prompted a lasting aversion to the vegetable, Mr. Juma said, speaking with what sounded like real authority.

That is not quite right, a sect elder spelled out later. Indeed Yazidis suffered persecution, he said, such that one ruthless potentate who controlled the nearby splendid city of Mosul in the 13th century ordered an early Yazidi saint executed. The enthusiastic crowd then pelted the corpse with heads of lettuce. There have been sanctions against salad ever since, the elder intoned.

Ask a government-issued minder from Mosul, a Muslim, and he mutters about how Yazidis believe that the local romaine houses Lucifer, whom he says they worship, so they refuse to chop the heads off the roots.

In the end, the art of dissembling about their religion, perhaps the strongest Yazidi tradition, triumphs. No clear explanation emerges.

Armies and empires have crisscrossed Iraq for thousands of years, leaving the remnants of spectacular civilizations scattered from the Persian Gulf to the mountains of northern Kurdistan.

Peoples who seem to date from another time and another place — Mandeans who worship John the Baptist, Assyrians, Turkmen — still inhabit forgotten pockets, caught in an eddy as history swirled on.

The fact that Yazidis have long clung to their microreligion amid far larger concentrations of Christians and Muslims testifies to the ferocity of belief in this region. Indeed, its agglomeration of peoples and faiths is one reason Iraq is considered a fractious place, difficult to govern.

The village of Bashiqa, home to 5,000 people, sits where the Mosul plain meets the plump foothills of the Maklub Mountains. Its Chaldean Catholic church, mosque and Yazidi temple sit within hailing distance of each other.

Surrounding olive groves produce the sacred oil for Yazidi temple lanterns, and distinctive, conical Yazidi tombs dominate the hills. The metal ball topping the tall skinny dome of the pale sandstone tombs represents the sun, and 12 vertical stone ridges radiating down from the ball represent its hallowed rays and the hours of the day.

The Yazidis, who are ethnically Kurds, maintain one of the most eclectic of faiths.

They have adopted Christian rituals like baptism and a smattering of practices from Islam ranging from circumcision to removal of their shoes inside their temples. The importance of fire as a divine manifestation comes from Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian faith that forms the core of Yazidi beliefs. Indeed their very name is likely taken from an old Persian word for angel.

The veneration of their saints' tombs means few Yazidis have ever wandered far from their Iraqi roots, although there are branches in Turkey, Syria, Iran, the Caucasus and, because of modern migrations, Germany. Estimates on their numbers swing wildly, but are generally put around 300,000 in Iraq.

Yazidis venerate Sheik Adi bin Musafir, a 12th-century Lebanese-born Arab mystic whose tomb, in Lalish in northern Iraq, is their main place of pilgrimage. They say Sheik Adi revived a faith dating back to Adam.

The sect lacks any written text, which helps account for the tall tale aspect of explaining its tenets. Their religious hierarchy is topped by a prince. His title is hereditary, and he can marry only from an upper caste of some 300 families.

Allegations of satanic worship stem from the central figure among the seven angels they worship. Yazidis consider Ta'us, or the Peacock Angel, to be the devil, but worthy of veneration as one of God's creatures who repented and should be appeased to avert his wrath. His tears on his repentance are said to have doused the flames of hell, putting it permanently out of business.

Yazidis pray three times a day, at dawn, midday and sunset, facing the direction of the sun each time. "The sun is very holy to us," said Walid Abu Khudur, the stocky, bearded guardian of the temple built in honor of a holy man here. "It is like the eye of God, so we pray toward it."

Yazidi elders do worry about their dwindling numbers, since Iraq's desperate economic conditions have pushed the young to emigrate.

"The young want a better life," said Prince Tahseen Sayigh Aly, the sect's leader, sitting in a gloomy room dominated by a life-size picture of President Saddam Hussein propped up in the corner. "Of course we are worried about disappearing, especially since the young cannot marry outside the faith."

Under the secularism of the Baath Party ruling Iraq, all religions are tolerated.

If the Yazidis are tolerated, they are not exactly loved. A Muslim from Baghdad visiting the Yazidis for the first time refuses all offers of tea and coffee lest it be somehow tainted. He shakes his head at the various explanations of the faith, believing that the Yazidis make it up wholesale.

One Yazidi mentions that wearing blue is banned during religious festivals. The first explanation offered suggests that blue is the sole province of the Peacock Angel. But it also seems that one of the Turkish armies who killed some 100,000 Yazidis in 1831 was outfitted in blue, and ever since .