volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

A Thieves' Settlement. 213
might have been in a much more uncomfortable place.
When the shekh had prepared another similar basin
for the Arab whom Masalat had sent to guide us, he
came back to us with two or three friends and squatted
by the fire and began to talk. He told me that there
were twenty houses in the village of Khatunlyah, and
that in ordinary times about 150 people lived there ;
it was a " thieves' settlement," and he was Ash-Shekh
al-Haramiyu or " Shekh Thief." Every man there was
an outlaw, and many of them had suffered fines and
imprisonment, and beatings at the hands of Turkish
officials. Every fugitive from the Government took
refuge at Khatuniyah and was protected and hidden
from his pursuers. Caravans employed the men from
this thieves' village as guides and scouts and paid them in
kind, and in this way they managed to maintain their
wives and families. Every now and then the Turkish
Government ordered the " thieves " of Khatuniyah to
be destroyed, but when the soldiers arrived to carry out
the order they never found anyone there. All the
young and strong men escaped to the Sinjar hills, having
first put the women and children in their underground
basins, and heaped stones over the entrances to them.
Time after time parties of soldiers arrived there and
marched along the tongue of land, or small isthmus,
to the peninsula in the lake, and seeing no sign of life
there retreated quickly, fearing an ambush. I asked
the shekh many questions about the history of the
town which once stood on the peninsula, but he had no
facts to give me. He had heard that in comparatively
recent times the Arabs had lived there, but had fought
among themselves and then left the place. ^ But one of
the men with the shekh said that he had heard that
the village belonged to the Yazidis before the Arabs,
and that they had held it for a long time. The Arabs
came and settled in the town and about the lake, and
then they quarrelled with the Yazidis about building a
1 This is, substantially, what the natives told Layard in 1850
see Nineveh and Babylon, p. 324.