a Syrian Monastery," written in 1895.

After the Yazidis had been told to convert, Parry wrote, "none responded. Christianity they were less unready to accept; the Christians were their friends and fellow-sufferers. Islam had always cursed and persecuted them." So the Sultan sent troops commanded by his son to Yazidi villages. "The soldiers slew in all some five hundred men. ... The pretty women and girls he took captive, marrying them by force to his soldiers."

The Yazidis did indeed see Christians as fellow sufferers. A hundred years ago, they helped Armenian Christians fleeing Turkey to settle in the shadow of the Sinjar Mountains, along with Chaldean and Syriac Catholics. But in the spring of 1918, Turkish forces arrived and destroyed the settlement as well as many Yazidi homes.

For awhile after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Yazidis were unsure whether they would end up as part of Iraq or Syria. Eventually, in 1933, an international commission placed Sinjar inside Iraq -- a decision by colonial overlords that would later haunt the Yazidis. During Saddam Hussein's rule, many of their settlements were razed and their inhabitants forced into "collective villages" as a buffer against the troublesome Kurds.

As Matthew Barber writes in the blog Syria Comment, "Saddam bulldozed countless Yazidi towns until there was nothing left but gravel, and then forcibly moved their former inhabitants into collectives situated in locations that served his strategic interests." At least one of those collectives saw its population swell with refugees from Sinjar in recent days.

Even after Hussein was overthrown, there