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thousands of Yazidis— a mostly Kurdish-speaking people who practice a

unique, syncretic faith— fled the advance through northern Iraq of the Islamic

State's Sunni jihadists, who have set about abducting and killing hundreds of

members of this religious minority. As The Washington Post's LovedayMorris reports, as many as 40,000 remain stranded on "the craggy peaks of

Mount Sinjar," dying of hunger and thirst and devoid of much support from a

faltering Iraqi government.

Ever since seizing Mosul, Iraq's main urban center in the north, the forces of

the Islamic State have embarked on a gruesome mission to transform their

domain into an idealized Caliphate—

 on the way, they've forced theconversion of religious minorities, destroyed the shrines of rival sects and

 butchered those they consider apostates. Yesterday, a distraught Yazidi

member of parliament in Baghdad made an impassioned appeal on behalf of

her people: "An entire religion is being exterminated from the face of the

Earth," she said.

The Yazidis, globally, number about 700,000 people, but the vast majority of

the community— about half a million to 600,000— live concentrated in

Iraq's north. The city of Sinjar was their heartland. Now, it's in the possession

of extremists who seem bent on ethnic cleansing.

The Yazidi faith is a fascinating mix of ancient religions. Its reputed founder

 was an 11th-century Umayyad sheik whose lineage connected him to the first

great Islamic political dynasty. His tomb in the Iraqi city of Lalish is a site of

 Yazidi pilgrimage, mirroring the Sufi practices of millions of Muslims

elsewhere; now, there are reports of the town being turned into a refugee

camp for the displaced.

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Despite its connections to Islam, the faith remains distinctly apart. It was one

of the non-Abrahamic creeds left in the Middle East, drawing on various pre-

Islamic and Persian traditions. Yazidis believe in a form of reincarnation and

adhere to a strict caste system. Yazidism borrows from Zoroastrianism, whichheld sway in what's now Iran and its environs before the advent of Islam, and

even the mysteries of Mithraism, a quasi-monotheistic religion that was

popular for centuries in the Roman Empire, particularly among soldiers. Not

unlike the rituals of  India's Parsis — latter-day Zoroastrians— Yazidis light

candles in religious ceremonies as a sign of the triumph of light over darkness.

 Yazidis believe in one God who is represented by seven angels. According to Yazidi lore, one of the angels, Malak Tawous, was sent to Earth after refusing

to bow to Adam, explains the Economist. Represented in peacock form, he is

considered neither wholly good nor evil by Yazidis, but Muslim outsiders

know him as "shaytan," or Satan. The Islamic State has justified its slaughter

of Yazidis on the basis of the long-standing slur that they are "devil-

 worshipers."

Bobby Ghosh, former Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief,  writes that his

Sunni and Shiite colleagues referred to Yazidis as devil-worshipers "as a joke,

even a term of endearment." But the Islamic State "is taking the false claim of

satanism far too seriously."

 Well before the current outrages— which have targeted other religious

minorities in Iraq as well— the sect suffered a long history of persecution,

caught amid the overlapping ambitions of empires and later the emergence of

fractious Arab states. The Yazidi member in the Iraqi parliament referenced

"72 massacres" in her people's history, ranging from the rampages of

conquering Mongols to the zealous purges of the Ottomans, who at various

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moments targeted the Yazidis, including during the early 20th-century

massacres of Armenians that many now consider a genocide.

The Yazidis' fragile existence in northern Iraq grew more delicate after the2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country and the ousting of Saddam Hussein's

nominally secular dictatorial regime. In 2007, coordinated  bomb blasts in a

 Yazidi village in northwestern Iraq killed about 800 people— it was at the

time the worst single terror attack since the American invasion.

 After Baghdad's deeply polarized sectarian politics took hold and militants

gained sway, much of northern Iraq's ancient Christian population has

steadily fled to diasporic communities in Europe. The Yazidis largely remainedin their historical homeland, by their mountains and shrines. That life,

though, also may now be a thing of the past.