Several years ago our team did a medical outreach to the large Yezede village of Biban, a very needy place just outside the Kurdish region about 18 miles from the city of Mosul which is still one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq. We were overwhelmed by the response, over two hundred people came for treatment and we were all very busy. My son Peter, a former Army Combat Medic, was triaging for Dr. Robert Doe, our team physician, I was in charge of the pharmacy and was busy passing out the medications that Dr. Doe prescribed when I noticed that my son was praying for a deaf teenage boy. A crowd was gathered around them and one young Yezede man who spoke rudimentary English was translating for Peter. I remember this young man getting excited and telling Pete, He says he can hear now! After that, a number of Yezede women came to Peter, patting themselves on the top of their heads, their way of saying, “Pray for us too!” The rest of us were so busy we couldn’t break away to see what was going on and by the time the crowd dissipated the boy who was healed was gone as well so we could never confirm, after the fact, that he was indeed healed, but we all felt that we had experienced our first miracle of healing in Iraq and reported it as such back then.
Last week I was out in Lancaster, PA sharing an Iraq progress report at the annual YWAM Banquet at Coatesville; YWAM Coatesville has been a major contributor to the success of our IDP housing project in Passe Village, N. Iraq. I also ministered for our Church in Lancaster, In The Light Ministries. There I met with Dr. Doe who had been in N. Iraq a short time before my return. While there, he met a Yezede man who had come to Christ, he was from Biban. Doc started telling him how we had done a medical outreach in his village and how that The Lord had healed a deaf boy there. The man said excitedly, I was there! I saw it and that’s why I came to Christ! He went on to say that he had won several other Yezedes to Christ and that they had formed a small house church in that area, all on their own. PRAISE GOD! The Yezede people are non-Muslim Kurds, they have been considered devil worshippers by the Muslims because of their strange practice of angel worship, their principal worship being directed toward Mauk Taus, the peacock angel. This is the fallen angel we call Satan, though Yezede people are greatly offended at the name Satan and will cover their ears and display anger if they hear the word. Yezedes are not evangelical, they are not looking for converts, and they are concerned with the preservation of the sacred bloodline of Adam which they believe they carry unbroken from the creation. Because of this belief they inter-marry, the result being that many of their children suffer horrible genetic diseases. They are also a persecuted people. The insurgents recently tried to send a car bomb into a nearby village with the intent of killing two hundred or more of them. Fortunately, Kurdish security forces intercepted it. A few years back a similar attack on another Yezede village killed a very large number of people and destroyed many of their homes. Today, the Lord is moving among these people and we are beginning to see a response to the Gospel among them. As the scripture says… “The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.” ~ Jack Harris
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