I don't often talk about feelings or anything like that on here, but I wanted to make a short thread about my relationship to the plight of Yazidis, why I tweet what I do, attend the events I do, what is the compulsion?

Before 2014, I had never met a Yazidi in real life. I grew up [without social media] in London and mostly made Assyrian friends as well as a few Arab and Kurdish ones. It was only from my studies that I began encountering the smaller neighbours Assyrians had across our homeland.

To me, Yazidis were a group I had only read about in books, saw in NGO reports, brought up as part of some list of historically oppressed peoples. I had never known their struggles first-hand, nor heard one speak of them in real life. It was too abstract, too remote to grasp.

When the disaster of 2014 befell all of us, I was working a corporate job and constantly had one of my three screens open on social media, unable to concentrate on anything else. Powerlessly, all I saw was death, misery and betrayal every day. Not just for us, but for Yazidis.

Seeing terrorists wander around my grandmother's town laughing and taking pictures, my attention was naturally on Assyrians. Beyond this, I saw Yazidis suffering unimaginable things. Suddenly, they were real people. I saw them flee their homeland alongside Assyrians fleeing ours.

I saw the same forces that were trying to destroy us trying to destroy them. I saw the same governments who were rubbing their hands together at our demise do the same about them. In the context of the region, I realised that our fates are tied together - as were our histories.

When Bedr Khan Beg massacred thousands of Assyrians across Hakkari in the 1840's, it also impacted the Yazidis nearby who were subject to attacks from the same source. Each community's ability to defend itself from these attacks decreased when each other suffered losses.

The cleansing of Yazidis across Nineveh by Kurdish warlords within the Ottoman Empire is an important factor in the demographics of Nineveh we have today. And then you factor in Arabisation... Before this, there were more Yazidi villages in Nineveh, more Assyrian villages.

My learning of this shared, inter-connected history impacted my ideas for the present and future for our communities. I began attending events in UK parliament where I listened to testimonies from Yazidi survivors, military figures, and met wonderful activists like @GianAldonani

Above all else, I could empathise so much. This was an indigenous, little understood and minoritised community that had been betrayed and abandoned by all, struggling to keep their head above water in a sea of hostility. Together, we were already united whether we knew it or not.

I had worked in politics in the past and had spoken about Yazidis in a distant, academic sense. But I wanted them to be real to me after 2014 because their suffering and their determination to endure it and prevail were attributes I associated with my own Assyrian community.

Since 2014, I have been attacked and lambasted on social media for talking about Yazidis as much as I do (you can guess by what sections of social media too). It doesn't bother me at all. These are attitudes which reveal hatred and chauvinism - things we must confront together.

I learned that the relationship between Yazidis & Assyrians isn't an artificial one created for social media; it is one that is centuries old that we are redeveloping in a diaspora context. We would actually do well to develop it to the degree it already exists in our homelands.

This isn't just flavour of the month stuff where injustice is called out impersonally online just because. Its very personal and empirical. Assyrians and Yazidis have horizontal relationships which are not defined by exploitation, begging or whatever along vertical hierarchies.

The chaos of recent years is a reminder that our futures are tied together in an Iraq that is doing its best to destroy itself. The process of realisation, collaboration and liberation is ultimately slow, but I have always thought there is great potential for all of this.
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