Hell's angels
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=468225
Scorned as 'Devil worshippers', Iraq's Yezidi tribe have survived
centuries of abuse. But could the overthrow of Saddam Hussein provide
their greatest challenge yet? Justin Huggler reports
29 November 2003
Don't even mention the word Satan," we were warned before we went to
Sinjar. "If you even say that word there, they will make serious
trouble for you." That seemed a little strange, as the people we were
going to visit are a religious community persecuted across the Middle
East as Devil-worshippers.
It does not take long to find unusual-looking people in Sinjar, a
pleasant town of old stone buildings under a barren mountain ridge.
There are old men with their hair woven into long plaits on either
side of their heads, who look like nothing so much as Asterix and
Obelix. Others wear huge, bushy, untrimmed moustaches and strange,
conical caps. These are the Yezidi, wrongly called the
Devil-worshippers, Iraq's most bizarre, and most persecuted minority.
The overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime has opened the Yezidi to
the outside world in a way they have not known for years.
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