The Yazidi Genocide by the Soran Emirate, 1832 to 1834

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A campaign of mass killing and enslavement was carried out against the Yazidis of Sheikhan, Sinjar and Erbil, in what is now northern Iraq, between March 1832 and 1834 by Mir Muhammad of Rawanduz, the Kurdish emir of the Ottoman-era Soran Emirate. Mir Muhammad acted under religious fatwas declaring the Yazidis infidels whose lives, property and women were legitimate spoils, sanction that traced to a 1724 fatwa by Sheikh Abd-Allah Rabbatki and was reinforced by further fatwas from Mir Muhammad's own mufti, Mulla Muhammad Khatt-i. Described by historians as the bloodiest single episode in recorded Yazidi history, the campaign was led with the support of Mir Muhammad's brother Rasul Beg and Bedir Khan Beg.

The Sheikhan, Sinjar and Erbil Yazidi communities suffered catastrophic losses; the historian Sadiq al-Damlouji assessed that only about five percent of the targeted population survived. Around 10,000 Yazidis, mostly women and children, were enslaved and transported to Rawanduz, and survivors scattered as far as Mount Judi and Tur Abdin. The episode set a pattern of further Ottoman-era firmans and campaigns against the Yazidis through the rest of the nineteenth century, including under Omar Wehbi Pasha later in the century.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The death toll of Mir Muhammad's 1832 to 1834 campaign is counted narrowly by this atlas: the range of seventy to one hundred thirty five thousand recorded here counts those killed directly in the campaign itself, excluding the roughly 10,000 enslaved and transported to Rawanduz, most of them women and children, who are recorded separately as displaced rather than as dead. It also does not fold in losses from the further Ottoman-era campaigns against Yazidis in Sinjar and Ridvan later in the 1830s, which this atlas records as part of the same wider pattern without merging their tolls into this one episode's count.

No government or international judicial body has issued a formal genocide determination for this specific nineteenth century campaign; it is documented in Yazidi communal memory and in peer-reviewed genocide-studies scholarship, including Majid Hassan Ali's dedicated study of the firman that authorized it, as the deadliest single episode in the wider historical record of Ottoman-era violence against the community. The Soran Emirate acted on its own initiative under religious fatwas rather than direct Ottoman imperial order, though it sits within a wider nineteenth century pattern of Ottoman-era campaigns against the Yazidis, including further Ottoman military operations against the Sinjar and Ridvan Yazidi communities in 1834 to 1836.