A new tessera seems to have recently been added to the intricate Middle Eastern puzzle; that of the Yazidis (or Yezidis) fighting Islamic extremism and often mentioned by the press, especially since August 2014, when, while facing Kurdish anti-ISIS resistance in Kobane, the "Stalingrad of the Middle East”, the so-called “Islamic State” started to seriously persecute the Yazidis. IS did this with an emblematic event, trapping about 30,000 Yazidis on the Sinjar mountains (an area in northern Iraq about 50 km from the Syrian border and close to Iraqi Kurdistan). This was followed by airlifts to release them organised by the United States, Australia and France. But who are the Yazidis, and what is their position on the religious geopolitical chessboard that stretches from the Caucasus to the Mediterranean?