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Iraq's Kurd Shabaks demand to annex their
areas to Kurdistan Region
2.11.2008
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November 2, 2008
MOSUL, Northwest Iraq,—
Hundreds of Iraq’s Shabak people on Sunday took to
the streets in Ninewa calling for including them in
Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, according to a
local official.
“Today, hundreds of Shabak people staged a peaceful
demonstration, calling for incorporating them into
the Kurdistan region on the basis that they are
Kurds, not Arabs,” the head of Ninewa’s Basheeqa
district, Thanoun Younis, told VOI.
The Shabak people are an ethnic group that lives
primarily in the province of Ninewa in Iraq. Their
language,www.ekurd.net
Shabaki, is a
Zaza-Gorani dialect, similar to Kurdish, with many
borrowings from Turkish, Persian, and Arabic.
According to another source, they speak a dialect of
Kurdish with borrowings from Arabic and Turkish.
They are scattered throughout 35 villages located in
the east of Mosul.
While Kurds considered the Shabak ethnically Kurds,www.ekurd.net
they identified
themselves as Shiites and a separate ethnic group.
Despite having an amount of Kurdish population, it
does not form part of the area controlled by the
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
There are different communities in Mosul like
Christians, Shiites and Kurds along with a Sunni
majority.
The city is also a historic center for the Nestorian
Christianity of the Assyrians, containing the tombs
of several Old Testament prophets such as Jonah,
Yunus in Arabic, and Nahum.
Mosul, capital city of Ninewa province in Iraq, near
the border with Kurdistan region, lies 405 km north
of Baghdad.
A Kurdish Yazidis are primarily ethnic Kurds located
near Mosul. Some 350,000 Yazidis live in villages
around Mosul near Kurdistan autonomous region
border.
Kurdish Yazidis look to
Kurdistan region, the Kurdish Yazidis
are concentrated in key areas for the referendum,
including lands coveted by the Kurds north of Mosul
and around Sinjar on the Syrian border. The Kurds
see the referendum as a chance to right Saddam
Hussein's historic wrongs of forced population
transfer and Arabization. The Arabs see it as a
Kurdish land grab.
"We hope that the land now lived on by the Yazidis
will join the Kurdish area," the community's leader,
Amir Tahseen Beg, told the Associated Press from his
residence in Sheikhan. "This will depend on the
referendum, but our areas must return to the
original motherland."
The Yazidis are a dominant group in the northwest
region, a historically oppressed people who speak
Kurdish and are ethnically Kurd but follow their own
religion. In fact, they are reputed to be devil
worshippers, not just by Iraqi Muslims but they’ve
been characterized that way by Western scholars over
the years.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
VOI | Agencies
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