A religous minority in Iraq: A secret sect
In A village called Shalyar, near the oil city of Kirkuk, an officer tries to explain where his tiny community fits in Iraq’s religious mosaic. Imam Ali, the martyred hero of Shia Islam, adorns his wall. But Major Farhad Nazar is not Shia; nor, unlike most fellow Kurds, is he Sunni. He speaks for the […]In A village called Shalyar, near the oil city of Kirkuk, an officer tries to explain where his tiny community fits in Iraq’s religious mosaic. Imam Ali, the martyred hero of Shia Islam, adorns his wall. But Major Farhad Nazar is not Shia; nor, unlike most fellow Kurds, is he Sunni. He speaks for the Kakai, a small, secretive group which is monotheistic and reveres Imam Ali but (unlike most Muslims) accepts reincarnation. That mix makes them a big target for Islamic State (IS) which proclaims a violently puritanical Sunni line.
Major Nazar, who was jailed in 1993 as a dissident against the late dictator, Saddam Hussein, laments that “IS has two reasons to kill us, we are Kurdish and Kakai.” But his community, numbering about 75,000, has been toughened by a decade of persecution. At least 218 civilian members have been slain in Iraq’s turmoil since the American invasion of 2003, but none has been killed since IS overran the once-diverse city of Mosul last August. That is partly because the Kakai had already been displaced from traditional homes before last year’s flare-up; and some Kakai villages are in land still held by their Kurdish kin. But they did see three shrines destroyed in last year’s advance.
