ALAGYAZ, Armenia — Just an hour’s drive from Armenia’s bustling capital city of Yerevan, Vazir Avdalyan sat in his living room in this rural village and took a long drag off his cigarette, trying to concentrate on the task at hand. As the director of the village school, he should have been preparing for the start of the academic year.

But he had more pressing concerns on his mind: the plight of his people, the Yazidis, in Iraq.

Long considered a minority of a minority in Iraq, these previously obscure adherents to a religion influenced by Zoroastrianism, Christianity and the Sufi tradition in Islam found themselves in the international spotlight last month. Tens of thousands of them had fled into the ranges of Mount Sinjar to escape the murderous advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, prompting an international effort to bring them relief.

“We are one of the most ancient people in the world; we need to be helped,” Avdalyan said. “This religion shouldn’t be lost, even just for the sake of preserving history.”

It is a religion that has attracted persecution for centuries, from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries, which forced them to flee to the Caucasus, to the destruction of Yazidi villages during Saddam Hussein’s reign in Iraq, in what became known as the Halabja massacre, when Kurds and other minorities were systematically targeted.