Daesh ruins wedding plans of Yazidi with 3 wives

An Iraqi Kurdish news agency has reported that a Yazidi man’s nuptial arrangements were ruined when Daesh attacked his town near Sinjar, northern Iraq in August 2014. The Yazidi man was planning on taking a fourth wife.

Dakhil Khalaf, 48, from Iraq’s Yazidi ethno-religious minority, not only has three wives but he also has 34 children, all of whom fled with him when he left Sinjar after Daesh attacked.

Khalaf told the online news site Rudaw that Daesh violence put an end to his matrimonial plans at the Bersewi refugee camp in Zakho, on the Turkish border.

“I was planning to get married for the fourth time, with the consent of my wives, but I did not manage to make it as [Daesh] forced us to flee,” he told Rudaw from his tent in the refugee camp.

Khalaf expressed that he knew all the names of the children in his exceptionally large family, and said: “I love them all without favouritism. God has given them to me as I love kids. I am very comfortable with them and have no problems with my wives.”

Managing care and provisions for such a large family inside a camp for displaced people has been difficult.

“We do not have work and there is no salary. Before the arrival of [Daesh] my children were used to working, but our life is miserable now,” he complained, explaining that the eldest of his brood was born in 1989.

The report was not clear on whether Khalaf planned to reignite his designs for a fourth marriage once Daesh had been forced out of Iraq.

The Yazidis, a small community numbering under 100,000, have their own faith distinct from Islam that shares aspects of Persian Zoroastrianism. Ethnically, they are close to Kurds, who are mostly Sunni Muslims, but have been known to identify as distinct from most other Kurdish people in the region.