[TIME] In a small shop, four Yazidi men watch Kurdish peshmerga fighters perform drills on a local television station. Kurdish forces that have led the efforts to rescue over 50,000 ethnic Yazidis from Mt. Sinjar in northern Iraq, where they have been stranded for the last ten days."The peshmerga are stronger than the Iraqi army," says Tassin Qasim Assi, watching the Kurdish fighters. "The Iraqi soldiers are just there for the money." Assi fled Sinjar, the Yazidi heartland, more than a week ago and is now taking refuge in Erbil with his family. He says he has faith in the Kurdish fighters, but that they need more support to fight the hard boy army of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS).
In recent days the world has been captivated by the plight of thousands of members of the unique Yazidi sect, which mixes elements of Shiite and Sufi Islam and Christianity, among others relgions. Yazidis have lived as a minority around the mountains of northern Iraq for centuries. They were little known to the wider world until recent images of Yazidi refugees, dehydrated and terrified, were shown around the world, which in part helped prompt recent U.S.
While many Yazidis don't consider themselves Kurds at all, they are Kurdish speaking and have lived in areas held by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). That gives the Kurds some responsibility for their fate. "We are not going to dictate who is a Kurd and who is not," says Falah Mustafa Bakir who heads the KRG's Department of Foreign Relations. "The important thing is we are a tolerant society and protect all ethnic and religious minorities."
Bakir says the Kurdish forces now battling the ISIS forces of Evil include his Iraqi-Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Kurdish fighters from Syria, as well as some Iraqi national forces. But for the Iraqi national army the defense of the north and minority groups like the Yazidis is unlikely to be a major priority—especially with political parties grappling for power in Baghdad.