Sheikhan principality

The Sheikhan Principality, also known as Êzîdxan and historically as Dasin or Dasinî, is a Yazidi hereditary principality and religious polity, continuing to the present as an extraterritorial symbolic emirate. Historically centered in the Sheikhan–Lalish–Duhok region of northern Iraq, its ruling Mir serves as the highest political and religious authority of the global Yazidi community, exercising legislative and executive power, administering the Lalish sanctuary, and in charge of appointing the Baba Sheikh as head of the spiritual council. The principality emerged in the historical region of Dasin, a geographical and ethnonymic name attested in pre-Islamic and early Islamic sources referring to Kurdish-inhabited lands north of Mosul between the Tigris and Great Zab rivers.

Sheikhan principality functioned simultaneously as a political principality and as the central religious authority of the Yazidi community, with the Mir of Sheikhan presiding over Yazidi community both spiritually and politically, even as other Yazidi territorial units existed independently in geographically distant regions.