Ain Sifni

The Kurdish name of the town is derived from the plural form of "sheikh" ("holy man" in Kurdish), and thus translates to "[the land of the] holy men".[3][1]

Ain Sifni may have originally been a Christian village, but likely converted in the 13th/14th centuries, and a Yazidi community was present by the 19th century.[8] The district was founded on 16 December 1924.[9] Assyrians of the Baz clan of Hakkari settled at Ain Sifni after the Assyrian genocide in the First World War, and were attacked by the Iraqi army during the Simele massacre in 1933.[10] The Chaldean church of Mar Yousif was rebuilt in 1960, replacing an older church built in 1946-1948.[3]

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, two Iraqi military installations near Ain Sifni were struck by US airstrikes on 24 March.[11] Two battalions of the Iraqi 108th Regiment, 8th Infantry Division, were stationed at the town at this time.[12] The US bombing campaign against the garrison was ineffective, and an entire Iraqi battalion withdrew with no casualties.[12] On 6 April, ODAs 051, 055, and 056 of the US 10th Special Forces Group and 300 Peshmerga soldiers of the 12th Supay (battalion) seized the town, and 33 Iraqis were killed, 54 wounded, and 230 taken prisoner, and 1 Peshmerga casualty.[13]

In September 2007, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) signed a production sharing contract with Hunt Oil Company to extract oil near Ain Sifni, despite the town being officially outside the control of the KRG, and has since been declared illegal by the Iraqi government.[14] The concession at Ain Sifni is estimated to have reservoirs of 900 million recoverable barrels of oil.[15]

By December 2012, the Supreme Committee of Christian Affairs had constructed a priest house and community hall for local Christians.[3] The town had an estimated population of 11,498 in 2013.[5] Most of the town's population of 16,000 people fled during the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant offensive in August 2014, and under 500 men remained to defend Ain Sifni under the leadership of mayor Mamo al-Bagsri.[1] Humanitarian aid was delivered to Ain Sifni by the Assyrian Aid Society in November 2014.[16]

In November 2018, the refugee camp at Ain Sifni, which is inhabited by Yazidi refugees, was flooded by heavy rainfall.[6] The town was the residence of the Yazidi Emir Tahseen Said until he went into exile in Germany, where he died, and was buried at Ain Sifni on 5 February 2019.[17][18] Ain Sifni is largely populated by Yazidis,[19] most of whom speak Kurmanji Kurdish.[20]

• 
  Yazidi cemetery in Ain Sifni
• 
  Yazidi shrine of Nishingaha Peroz near Ain Sifni

Notes

Citations

• Donabed, Sargon George (2015). Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century. Edinburgh University Press.
• Finlayson, Kenneth (2005). "This is What You Signed Up For: The Attack on Ayn Sifni" (PDF). Veritas. 1 (1): 75–78.
• Wilmshurst, David (2000). The Ecclesiastical Organisation of the Church of the East, 1318–1913. Peeters Publishers.