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Kurdistan
Yezidis in Shingal protest against Khalid Shamo's death sentence on Monday February 17, 2020. Photo via Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Yezidis in Shingal and in camps around Zakho have decried a Nineveh Criminal Court decision that sentenced one of their own to death. Many Yezidis claim the trial was unfair and assert the innocence of the accused.
Farees Nawab Mohammed, a 25 year old Kurdish Peshmerga soldier from Zummar in Nineveh, was shot and killed in Shingal on February 3, 2017. One of his relatives was also injured.
The shooting took place in Khansour compound, in the Snune sub-district of Shingal. Shingal is the traditional homeland of Iraq’s Yezidi population.
Fifteen days after Farees was killed, 21 year old Khalid Shamo was arrested in relation to the homicide. On February 4, 2020, Shamo was sentenced to death by the Nineveh Criminal Court.
Shamo’s family asserts that their son was never at the crime scene to begin with.
“On the day the incident happen, my son was at Kadya camp in Zakho. In that afternoon [when the killing happened], we were distributing charity bread and tens of our village neighbors were in our house and saw my son,” claimed Shamo Qayrani, the father of Khalid Shamo.
Kadya camp and the crime scene are at least a hundred kilometers from each other.
The victim’s father, Nawab Mohammad, seems to agree that Khalid Shamo may well be innocent.
According to his father, Farees traveled to Shingal on February 2, 2017 to buy several tons of onions and then returned to Zummar. On February 3, Farees went back to Shingal with his relative. “He was killed in [that] afternoon,” stated his father.
According to Mohammad, the relative who was with Farees has asserted that he and Farees were stopped by four armed men who opened fire.
“According to what my relative says, this Yezidi youth [Shamo] was with [the armed men], but we don’t know who the actual criminal is,” Mohammad stated.
He added that he thought the possibility that Shamo was the perpetrator is low, and posited that the real perpetrators may still be at large.
On Monday, Yezidis protested in Shingal, demanding fairness for Shamo and claiming his innocence. They carried posters depicting Khalid Shamo behind bars along with phrases like “Rescue me” and “Freedom for the oppressed Khalid.”
“We call on all honorable Iraqis to intervene now to rescue the young Yezidi from this plot and unjust decision on part of judges,” read a statement by a spokesperson for the protesters in Shingal.
Khalida Khalid, a Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) MP and one of the two Yezidi MPs in the Iraqi Parliament, has already met with Iraqi judiciary and justice officials in an effort to help Shamo. Last Wednesday, she met with Fayed Zedan, the head of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council. He is the highest judicial authority in Iraq with oversight over the case in question.
On Monday, she met with Farouq Ameen, Iraq’s Minister of Justice, in a bid to address the case.
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