The Yezidee (Devil worshipers?)

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Thinly spread out among the mountain regions of Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, this dwindling faith has managed to survive 2,000 years of repeated massacres. Frequently confused with the Dacoits and Thugees of India they seem to have every mans hand raised against them.
In the 1930's Hollywood developed horror movies featuring assorted monsters such as Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Dracula, and the Mummy.
Among these was a sinister cult of foreign devil worshippers with a penchant for sacrificing luscious beauties, kidnapped for their wiles. These women were invariably laid out atop an altar where devotees of the devil chanted litanies to Satan while the evil priest waved a menacing knife vaguely pointing at a half exposed breast. At this point the hero bursts in to defeat the villain and rescue the maiden.
Thinly disguised allusions to the Yezidees hinted at the actual existence of a dread cult of devil worshipers on Earth.
Naturally, they got it all wrong! Hollywood has seldom been accused of not warping reality to make their case. Garbled accounts of the Yezidees are their only contact with reality and the outcome was a forgone conclusion. All sorts of fundamentalist preachers picked up on the theme in their sermons. Using the Yezidee as a prime example of the wickedness which stalks the earth. In every telling the distortions grew until the Yezidee were virtually lost within the cloud of myth.
So who are the Yezidee? What is their faith? Why are they dismissed as "Devil Worshipers"? Do they actually worship the Devil, ?
Little is know about the rituals of these people, and most of what is known has been corrupted and mangled. This is largely because they are intensely secretive about the details of their religion. Commendable work has been done to record their music and their dances which may have foreshadowed the "Whirling Dervishes" of the Sufi Moslem sect. Their medicine and general healing practices have been recorded but their theology is hardly known by anyone not of their faith.
Here we address these problems through a careful examination of the scanty available data, and attempt to reconstruct a general picture of the sect. Starting at it's inception and into present day to projecting a probable future. Since it is primarily a sociological problem, no absolute answers can be promised. Still this is apt to be the most accurate analysis ever attempted. Al the least it provides a worthwhile starting point for future understanding of the sect.