Iraq’s Yazidis rediscover lost history through photos found in a museum archive

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Archeologists studying ancient civilizations in northern Iraq during the 1930s also befriended the nearby Yazidi community, documenting their daily lives in photographs that were rediscovered after the Islamic State militant group devastated the tiny religious minority.

The black-and-white images ended up scattered among the 2,000 or so photographs from the excavation kept at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which led the ambitious dig.

One photo — a Yazidi shrine — caught the eye of Penn doctoral student Marc Marin Webb in 2022, nearly a decade after it was destroyed by IS extremists plundering the region. Webb and others began scouring museum files and gathered almost 300 photos to create a visual archive of the Yazidi people, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities.

The systematic attacks, which the United Nations called a genocide, killed thousands of Yazidis and sent thousands more into exile or sexual slavery. It also destroyed much of their built heritage and cultural history, and the small community has since become splintered around the world.

Ansam Basher, now a teacher in England, was overwhelmed with emotion when she saw the photos, particularly a batch from her grandparents’ wedding day in the early 1930s.

“No one would imagine that a person my age would lose their history because of the ISIS attack,” said the 43-year-old, using an acronym for the extremist group. Basher’s grandfather lived with her family while she was growing up in Bashiqa, a town outside Mosul. The city fell to IS in 2014.

“My albums, my childhood photos, all videos, my two brothers’ wedding videos (and) photos, disappeared. And now to see that my grandfather and great-grandfather’s photo all of a sudden just come to life again, this is something I’m really happy about,” she said. “Everybody is.”

A cache of cultural memory

The archive documents Yazidi people, places and traditions that IS sought to erase. Marin Webb is working with Nathaniel Brunt, a Toronto documentarian, to share it with the community, both through exhibits in the region and in digital form with the Yazidi diaspora.

“When they came to Sinjar, they went around and destroyed all the religious and heritage sites, so these photographs in themselves present a very strong resistance against that act of destruction,” said Brunt, a postdoctoral student at the University of Victoria Libraries. The city of Sinjar is the ancestral homeland of the Yazidis near the Syrian border.

The first exhibits took place in the region in April, when Yazidis gather to celebrate the New Year. Some were held outdoors in the very areas the photos documented nearly a century earlier.

“(It) was perceived as a beautiful way to bring memory back, a memory that was directly threatened through the ethnic cleansing campaign,” Marin Webb said.

Basher’s brother was visiting their hometown from Germany when he saw the exhibit and recognized his grandparents. That helped the researchers fill in some blanks.

The wedding photos show an elaborately dressed bride as she stands anxiously in the doorway of her home, proceeds with her dowry to her husband’s village, and finally enters his family home as a crowd looks on.

“I see my sister in black and white,” said Basher, noting the similar green eyes and skin tone her sister shares with their grandmother, Naama Sulayman.

Her grandfather, Bashir Sadiq Rashid al-Rashidani, came from a prominent family and often hosted the Penn archaeology crews at his cafe. He and his brother, like other local men, also worked on the excavations, prompting him to invite the westerners to his wedding. They in turn took the photos and even lent the couple a car for the occasion, the family said.

Some of the photos were taken by Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, the Penn Museum archaeologist who led excavations at two ancient Mesopotamian sites in the area, Tepe Gawra and Tell Billa.

“My grandfather used to talk a lot about that time,” said Basher, who uses a different spelling of the family surname than other relatives.

Her father, Mohsin Bashir Sadiq, 77, a retired teacher now living in Cologne, Germany, believes the wedding was the first time anyone in the town used a car, which he described as a 1927 model. It can be seen at the back of the wedding procession.

Basher has shared the photos on social media to educate people about her homeland.

“The idea or the picture they have in their mind about Iraq is so different from the reality, ” she said. “We’ve been suffering a lot, but we still have some history.”

Found photos, history awakened

Other photos in the collection show people at home, at work, at religious gatherings.

To Marin Webb, an architect from Barcelona, they show the Yazidis as they lived, instead of equating them with the violence they later endured. Locals who saw the exhibit told him it “shows the world that we’re also people.”

An isolated minority, the Yazidis have been persecuted for centuries. Many Muslim sects consider them infidels; many Iraqis falsely see them as worshippers of Satan. They speak Kurdish and their traditions are amalgamated, borrowing from Christianity, Islam and the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism.

Basher is grateful the photos remained safe — if largely out of sight — at the museum all this time. Alessandro Pezzati, the museum’s senior archivist, was one of several people who helped Marin Webb comb through the files to identify them.

“A lot of these collections are sleeping until they get woken up by people like him,” Pezzati said.