Yazidis of Syria’s Ras Al-Ein between displacement and hopes of a return
Sari Kani/Ras Al-Ayn – North-Press Agency
Hassan Abdullah
“They shot Murad to death and hanged Ali behind their car and dragged him from the village of Al-Asadiya to the village of Tal Halaf near Sare Kani, when they knew he was still alive, they shot him until they made sure he was dead.”
With eyes full of sadness and sorrow, Abu Rezan looked at his village as recounting how members of the armed groups of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) had attacked the last remaining Yazidis in his village of Al-Asadiya, 8 km east of Sare Kani/Ras Al-Ayn in the far north of Syria, where Abu Rezan along with 40 other Yazidi families were used to live in the village.
Domination and evacuation
At 3:00 a.m. in mid-August 2013, a group of the Free Syrian Army attacked the village of Al-Asadiya and killed two brother-civilians in the village, Ali and Murad Sa’ado, they terrorized the village, forcing the remaining people to leave their property. Most of the people migrated abroad, as FSA controlled most of the region, after the Yazidi villages were completely evacuated, militants of those groups looted all their belongings.
According to the statistics of the Yazidi House in 2012, more than 3.000 Yazidis were living in the area of Sare Kani, distributed over the city and several other villages: Al-Drei, Tleiliye, Al-Asadiya, Java, Dardara, Tal Sakher, Jan Tamr, Sukariye, Al-Sa’eed, Lazka, and Sheikh Hamoud. There were more than 50 families inside the city, as currently, only 15 families of about 100 people remained, while the villages were completely emptied from the Yazidis.
According to those statistics, the number of Yazidis in Al-Jazira region was about 15.000, while about 25.000 Yazidi were living in Afrin and its villages.
Abu Rezan talks about the good relationship of the people of all religions and sects in the villages and the neighboring areas, while his words turned into a tragedy with heartbreak as he recalled the memory of repeated campaigns of genocide against the Yazidis by the hands of their neighbors.
“We were relatives and cousins in this village living in harmony with all other people of the region, but some of the residents joined the armed groups, they betrayed us and brought us groups that looted everything belonged to the Yazidis,” said Abu Rezan in a choked voice.
In the same context, Ali Sheikho, who is in charge of the Yazidi House in Sari Kani, stated that those groups attacked Yazidis targeting, mainly, the Kurdish existence in the region, “They wanted to remove us from this country and take over our land and property.”
Sheikho recalled the night of the attack on Al-Asadiya village saying, “a car with about 10 armed men came along with several other cars and surrounded the village.”
“We, as the people of the village, decided not to resist, because we worried about our women and children, where one of the neighbors told us that the group had a large force outside the village and asked us not to resist, for if we did so, they could, in turn, take revenge on women and children,” he said.
“After that incident, most of the remaining Yazidis decided to leave, as our lives and the lives of our children and women were at risk, which paved the way for the terrorist militants to take over our properties, where the village was emptied from its residents,” Sheikho added.
Displacing the Yazidis
As the village of Al-Asadiya, all Yazidi villages in Sari Kani were emptied between the years of 2012 and 2013 after similar incidents of kidnapping, threatening and looting.
In summer of 2012, with the beginning of security disorder in the region, as the Syrian government was still in charge of the region, an unknown armed group kidnapped Mahmoud Selo, a well-known Yazidi farmer and a landowner from the village of Khirbet Al-Banat (10 km) south of Sari Kani, the kidnappers demanded ransom money of about SYP 6 million (more than 60 thousand dollars at that time).
They also kidnapped two persons of Al-Metto family from the village of Java, as well as sending threatening messages to many Yazidis, which it led to the migration of most of the Yazidi people abroad and the emptiness of their villages.
“There were 8 Yazidi families in Al-Dardara village, most of whom own most of the lands in the village. They all left and no one remained.” Said Ibrahim Al-Ahmad from the village of Al-Dardara.
New Residents
Following the process of displacement of these Yazidi villages, families from Raqqa, Mount Kizwan (Abdul Aziz), Deir ez-Zor and the neighboring areas came and dwelled in the houses of the Yazidis. They worked in the agriculture and sheep-raising, along with other families, whose members were either related to the armed groups or civilians, came in greed of agricultural areas and their nearby locations to the city of Sari Kani, as the situation of these villages, with concrete houses, and wooded forests, were very good compared to others.
Aziz Al-Mulla, a representative of one of the residents of the village of Al-Asadiya, who is a Muslim Arab who has been living in the village for nearly 15 years. He named the village “the bleeding” because of what had happened to it saying: “The village was a small paradise, where they expelled its original inhabitants and replaced it by others. They looted millions of dollars from them, they even stole doors of houses, its situation is tragic, there are those who have settled in the Yazidi villages who deliberately destroy them, they want to remove the traces of the original inhabitants.”
“Some of the settlers in the Yazidi villages are farmers for landlords or tenants and they have permission from homeowners, while others are members of military institutions who refuse to evacuate the houses, although we demanded them at the request of the owners of these houses, and demanded that from the authorities in charge in the Autonomous Administration to evacuate houses whose residents do not have permission from their owners, to encourage the return of the original people, but we have not received any response or seen any efforts by those authorities on this regard,” Said Ali Sheikho.
According to Sheikho “A number of Yazidi people returned after the security situation in the area was improved, some of Yazidi families live in rented houses in Sare Kani, while strangers live in their houses.”
Omar Samao, a resident of the village of Java, returned from Europe to his village to see his house looted and inhabited by strangers, so he decided to return back to Europe.
“The Autonomous Administration treats us very bad, they do not appreciate our situation, the new residents including soldiers, aspire to stay in our houses and the properties of Yazidis remain theirs, they refuse to evacuate the houses, they are supported by their military leaders,” Sheikho added.
“Ready to evacuate the houses”
As the North-Press reporter surveyed the situation of the new dwellers, there was a kind of discrepancy in their situations, the majority of these families were members of military institutions, farmers for the owners or tenants or displaced from distant places fleeing the war or from nearby places. Most of them had no convincing reason to stay in the villages because their regions had been liberated for years and their houses still there, according to what they told “North-Press”.
However, most of them expressed their readiness to evacuate those houses if their original owners came back or if the Autonomous Administration provided them with alternative housing.
Aziz Ahmad Al-Obeid, from Raqqa, who lives in the house of a Yazidi person “Ali Sa’ado” in the village of Al-Asadiya, Aziz has 4 members of his family serving the ranks of the Syrian Democratic Forces, some of whom serve in Sari Kani and some in other places. He assured that he maintained the house and repaired it after being looted, where the doors and windows were taken off completely.
Nevertheless, Aziz Al-Obeid doesn’t want to go back to Raqqa, although his house there is not destroyed, and he wants to secure a house for himself in the same area before he evacuates the house.
While the family of Muhammad Abdullah Al-Khider, a military recruit for the Syrian government, from Hawsh Al-Na’im, 30 km west of Tal Tamr, lives in Java village and works as laborer in the region, confirming that they will evacuate the house if the owner, who is a Yazidi, came back from outside of the country and demanded them to do so.
Another family from Al-Mabrouka, 40 km south of Sari Kani, Ahmad Salem Al-Ali, who is an employee in the Autonomous Administration’s Traffic Department in Sari Kani, hopes not to be taken out of their place of residence in Al-Asadiya, because “the house is closer to the breadwinner’s place of work”.
As for their efforts to improve the situation and encourage Yazidis to return to the country, the representative of Yazidis in the Autonomous Administration, Elias Sheikhmos said: “We held several meetings and discussed this issue several times in the Autonomous Administration’s offices, the last, was with the leaders of People’s Protection Units (YPG) regarding taking out the families of their fighters living in Yazidis’ villages, which they lived in after seeing them empty. Some of them refused to leave a house when their owners returned and asked them to leave, we asked the military command to solve this problem as soon as possible, and they promised to do so”.
A house in Sari Kani, belonging to a Yazidi owner has already been restored to its original owner, after endeavors by some military officials.
Another house in the village of Khirbet Al-Banat has also been evacuated to be back to its owner, Selo family, where family members visit the area every now.
The Yazidi official said that they are seeking to solve the issue of the evacuation of Yazidi villages in a social manner “through the elders before taking any other procedures, in hope that more Yazidis will return in future”.
Between the displacement of the Yazidi people in the region by the extremist groups and the hopes of a return to their villages, years of stability under the authority of the Autonomous Administration appear to be insufficient to reassure and encourage the Yazidi people to go back to their homes.