HASAKAH, Syria—Just outside the small Yazidi village of Barzan, in northeastern Syria, 10-year-old Shadi Rasho stood up to recite a prayer. His light but melancholic voice continued for a few minutes as the room listened in silence.
“This is what children who stay here can do,” said Shadi’s older brother, 21-year-old Souliman Rasho.
Most of the family’s relatives have left for Europe—driven away by the discriminatory policies that Syrian authorities enforced over decades and persecution by the Islamic State. Yazidis are a predominantly Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious minority, historically inhabiting parts of modern-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Their religion, which dates back thousands of years, includes pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian, and Muslim elements.
Souliman gestured to a framed symbol of a peacock, hung in the center of the living room. For Yazidis, the peacock’s name is Melek Taus, an angel who beautified the earth at its creation. Etched below the peacock’s feet was a small drawing of the Yazidi Lalish Temple in Iraq.
Souliman reaches toward a photo of his late father, placed beneath a drawing of the symbolic Yazidi peacock, in their home near Barzan on July 24.
Yazidis have long faced persecution. Other faiths have misinterpreted Melek Taus as Satan and therefore accused Yazidis of being “devil-worshipers.” Members of the Yazidi community say they have endured 74 genocides over the millennia. The most recent was carried out by the Islamic State, which killed more than 3,000 Yazidis and enslaved, raped, and forcibly converted nearly 7,000 others.
Over the last decade, many Yazidis in Syria gained official recognition and a sense of protection under the Kurdish administration—which still controls much of the northeast. But now, with the arrival of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government, Syria’s Yazidis are uncertain of their future yet again. U.S.-backed Kurdish forces are now facing increasing pressure to merge into Sharaa’s national army—which has been implicated in massacres of other religious minorities in the country.
“We are all afraid of the new government,” said Layla Mehmo, one of the directors of the Yazidi House, an umbrella organization defending the rights of Yazidis in Syria. “We saw what happened to the Alawites and the Druze. They [the government] have the same mentality of ISIS.”
Ahmed Darwish Rasho’s grandson stands behind him in the dim light of their living room near Barzan on July 24.
Barzan is so small that it does not appear on almost any map but sits just north of Hasakah city and consists of dozens of mud homes—many of which now stand abandoned.
In 1947, Souliman’s relatives came to the area in search of a safe space to grow their crops and raise livestock, finding security in an isolated patch of desert. His family hails from Iraq, but many Yazidis have lived in other parts of Syria, such as northwestern Afrin province, since at least the 12th century.
Souliman’s great-uncle, 88-year-old Ahmed Darwish Rasho, still tends to his olive trees and vegetables on the village land. Wearing an all-white robe and sporting a bushy, droopy mustache—a distinguishable Yazidi style—he explained that like the majority of Yazidis in Syria, his family was stateless, meaning that they had no formal rights over their land.
Ahmed in his living room near Barzan on July 24.
Yazidis have been marginalized and denied recognition by successive Syrian governments, ultimately keeping much of the community impoverished. Under the Assad regime, they were forbidden from celebrating religious holidays and displaying religious symbols and were forced to participate in Islamic studies classes in public school.
This poverty and discrimination had already pushed many Yazidis to leave Syria before the Islamic State invasion, Mehmo said. Then, in 2014, as the group took over swaths of territory, about half of Yazidis fled the country—the population dropping from around 60,000 people in 2012 to just about 34,000 to 40,000, Mehmo added.
Among those who fled Barzan were six of Ahmed’s nine children. They are now living in Germany, where Ahmed believes the Yazidi culture will cease to exist. He fears that their strict religious customs will prove difficult to maintain in Western countries. Traditionally, marrying outside the Yazidi faith results in exclusion from the community. There is also an internal hierarchy within the faith that has traditionally determined marriages, with religious and community leaders belonging to a different caste. Ahmed worries that this, too, will be difficult to preserve with the Yazidi community now scattered across the globe.
Yet while we spoke, Ahmed called one of his sons, who offered a different perspective. Barakat Rasho now lives in Hanover with his seven children. Over the phone, Barakat explained how, unlike his father, he was hopeful that the Yazidi community could continue its traditions. He noted that there were more than 350,000 Yazidis in Germany and that they were advocating to build Yazidi temples and heritage museums in areas with significant diaspora communities. “It depends on us and our solidarity,” Barakat said.
Left: A traditional Yazidi pendant tied around Siham Darweesh Moustafa’s waist as she stands in the cemetery where her husband is buried on the outskirts of Barzan on July 24. Right: Moustafa tends to her livestock in the backyard of her home near Barzan on July 24.
By 2018, the Islamic State had lost most of its territory, and the dwindling Yazidi population gained official recognition under the newly established Kurdish administration, which had taken control of much of the northeast and parts of Aleppo governorate in the west.
With this protection, Yazidis could practice their religion openly for the first time in modern Syrian history. Cultural institutions, such as the Yazidi House, were established to maintain Yazidi traditions and spread awareness of their beliefs.
However, this newfound security would prove tenuous amid the shifting tide of the Syrian civil war. Following an offensive in early 2018, Yazidis living in Afrin found themselves living under the control of the Syrian National Army (SNA), a coalition of Turkish-backed opposition factions.
Fulla Shakro, 48, was among the thousands of Yazidis uprooted from their homes as a result. For 50 days, she said, SNA militiamen attacked her village, displacing nearly all of its residents. More than half of the Yazidi shrines in Afrin were also destroyed or desecrated, making it nearly impossible for the few Yazidis who remained to openly practice their faith.
Most fled to areas still under Kurdish control, such as Aleppo city’s Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighborhoods and an area known as Shahba Canton in northern Aleppo governorate.
But in December 2024, as Syrian rebels launched their lightning offensive to topple Bashar al-Assad, the Turkish-backed SNA drove Kurdish forces out of Shahba Canton, forcing thousands of Yazidis to flee once again.
A few months later, in April, Kurdish forces also withdrew from Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh, handing control to Damascus in accordance with a March agreement between the new Syrian president and Kurdish leader Mazloum Abdi, who heads the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Shakro, who has been living in Sheikh Maqsoud since fleeing Afrin, said she does not feel safe under the new Syrian forces. She and other Yazidis have limited their movements and are reluctant to venture outside their neighborhood as they once did.
“We’re not living a good life. We’re barely living,” she said. “Where is the freedom? Where is the security?”
Sharaa, a former leader of al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, has incorporated a slew of Salafi jihadis into top government and military positions. Among them are former SNA militiamen who attacked Afrin in 2018.
Sharaa appointed Ahmad al-Hayes, who led the SNA faction Ahrar al-Sharqiya, as commander of much of the northeast. Hayes was directly complicit in his militia’s abuses against religious and ethnic minorities, including the trafficking of Yazidi women and children.
The new Syrian government has attempted to reassure religious minorities that they will be protected. However, Syria’s new draft constitution describes Islam as the “principal source” of legislation and only respects freedom of belief for “divine religions”—meaning Christianity and Judaism but not the Yazidi faith.
“We feel excluded now, as if no one involves us,” Shakro said.
Layla Mehmo and Ismail Deif site beneath the symbolic peacock after a meeting at the Yazidi House in Barzan on July 24.Sandro Basili photos for Foreign Policy.
Meanwhile, Yazidis in the northeast have watched the events unfold in Aleppo as the Kurdish administration leaves, worried they, too, will soon face the same fate.
“There are undoubtedly concerns,” said Ismail Deif, 47, a director of the Yazidi House in Barzan who works with Mehmo. “The current government leading Syria includes dozens of factions whose hands are stained with the blood of the Syrian people.”
Deif said that after the December offensive, the northeast received around 2,600 Yazidis fleeing areas in Aleppo. Many came from displacement camps in Shahba Canton, which he said had been attacked by “extremists.”
“We would like the SDF to keep control over the area,” Mehmo added.
However, the United States has been pressuring Kurdish forces to accelerate implementation of their agreement to merge with Damascus. On Oct. 16, The Associated Press reported that Abdi had reached a breakthrough in the talks with Damascus, agreeing on the “mechanism” for the merger in which his forces would join the new Syrian military as a single large unit.
This has unsettled Barzan villagers. Souliman said he does not trust the new Syrian authorities. He said he would not dare venture into Damascus, fearful of what the new security forces might do to him at checkpoints along the way. Some official procedures, such as obtaining a passport, require residents of northeastern Syria to travel to the capital.
His great-uncle Ahmed expressed his frustration with the United States, explaining that he feels the United States once helped defend his community from the Islamic State but is now turning its back by supporting the new Syrian president.
“We are upset with what America is doing,” he said—insisting that his statement make it into print.
Mehmo and Deif also fear that without the SDF, the search for thousands of Yazidis kidnapped by the Islamic State will come to a halt. The group abducted a total of 6,417 Yazidis and only about half, or 3,573 people, have been freed, Deif said. The Yazidi House coordinates closely with Kurdish authorities on the search for the missing, including some kidnapped children who are still in the sprawling Islamic State detainment camp of al-Hol.
So far, the new Syrian government has made no effort to search for the dozens of Yazidis suspected of still being held captive in areas such as Idlib, Aleppo, and Hama, Deif said. “If the SDF is gone, it will be impossible to search for or free any missing persons.”
Mediha Ibrahim al-Hamad, a 20-year-old Yazidi activist and filmmaker, worries that the international community has forgotten the Yazidi cause. At age 10, she was kidnapped from her home in Sinjar, Iraq. She was sold as a sex slave to an Islamic State fighter and remained in captivity for three years, until she was 13.
The whereabouts of her parents remain unknown. “Where is my mom? Where is my dad?” she said in an interview with Foreign Policy in New York City, where she now lives.
“I feel so sad for my people. They are still missing, living in camps,” Hamad said, calling for the international community to put more resources toward the search for the missing—her story mirroring that of thousands of other women and girls.
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A woman in a long robe holds a water bottle and sprinkles water on large raised stone graves shaped like coffins. - Moustafa sprinkles water on graves in the cemetary near Barzan on July 24.
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A bearded man in a T0shirt next to a woman in a long robe and head white head covering who is turned partially away and looking to the right. - Moustafa and her grandson Souliman leave the cemetery on July 24.
Back in Barzan, Souliman said he hopes to stay in his village and carry on Yazidi customs like his father and grandfather before him. But the older generation was less hopeful that the Yazidi community would survive. Souliman’s grandmother, 67-year-old Siham Darweesh Moustafa, said her children who left will likely never return.
She wandered outside their home, past the chicken coop and sheep corral, to her husband’s grave. With a pointed cement roof, his gravestone resembled the holy temple of Lalish.
She splashed water on his grave, cooling it from the scalding desert heat. She then used a plastic water bottle to fill a small stone basin with water, explaining that it was one of her husband’s dying wishes to leave water for the birds. Other gravestones like his sat abandoned, with no one to visit them as she does.
If all her relatives returned to the village, she said, there would be hundreds more people to maintain the Yazidi community in Syria. “But the people are afraid,” she said, turning around and letting the remaining water trickle from her bottle into the basin.
