Shabak Kurds ask US to help Peshmerga free ISIS-occupied villages

WASHINGTON DC – A five-member delegation of Shabak Kurds urged the United States to help liberate their villages from the clutches of the Islamic State group (ISIS) by boosting military supplies to the Kurdistan Region’s Peshmerga forces.

“We met officials from the State Department and asked for complete support of Peshmerga forces,” Salim Jumaa Khudhur, an Iraqi MP from the Shabak minority, told Rudaw.

“We told them (American officials) that our land, the villages of Shabaks, Yezidis, Kakais, Christians and Turkmens cannot be freed without supporting the Peshmerga,” said Khudhur, whose delegation arrived in Washington last week at the invitation of the US government.

“We are in need of proper weapons and I am sure if there will be enough weapons in the hands of the Peshmerga the areas in Nineveh (province) can be freed sooner,” he added.

The delegation has been holding talks with officials from the State Department, Pentagon and White House, where the Shabaks urged President Barack Obama to do more to assist Kurdish forces in helping free their villages.

Iraq’s Shabak minority -- Kurds and have lived in the Nineveh area for centuries – was entirely displaced by an ISIS onslaught in June last year.

According to UN estimates some 400,000 Shabaks live in Iraq, mostly in the areas of Shingal, where their 56 villages have been seized by ISIS. More than 1,380 Shabaks have been killed and 208 remain missing.

Khudhur, who leads the delegation, said that most of the people have been displaced and resettled in the Kurdistan Region.

“Shabak villages are under complete control of ISIS,” he said, explaining that 80 percent live as internally displaced persons in the Kurdistan region and the rest are scattered across Iraq, including Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala.”

Peshmerga forces that are protecting a long border of more than 1,350 kilometers with ISIS have been pushing back the militants since last year from territories they seized in an initial push.

Kurdish officials have also expressed grave concerns that they are fighting with outdated weapons, while ISIS has more modernized weaponry that it seized from the Iraqi army. The United States insists on arming the Peshmerga only through the central government in Baghdad.

According to the Iraqi MP, Kurdistan Region President Masoud Barzani has facilitated the return of Shabaks to Kurdistan from other parts of Iraq.  He also complained that Baghdad had failed to provide adequately for the IDPs.

Khudhur denied that the delegation had asked Washington for support in arming a Shabak battalion as an independent force. He said the Shabak battalion is under the direct control of the KRG’s Peshmerga ministry.

Another member of the delegation, Ghazwan Aldawody, a is from the Nineveh provincial council, complained that Shabaks are targeted for their ethnicity as well as their religious beliefs.

“First they are Kurds and second the majority of Shabak are Shiites.”Even before ISIS, al-Qaeda was targeting the Shabak. We lost 1,400 people at the hands of al-Qaeda in Mosul,” he said.