Iraq’s Shabak to enter Ninewa council after elections

NINEWA / IraqiNews.com: Iraq’s Shabak are planning to enter Ninewa’s provincial council after the local elections scheduled for early next year, according to a Shabak parliamentarian. “The law on provincial council elections is unfair to ethnic minorities in Iraq. It undoubtedly reflects the indifference of the large constituents to minorities’ interests,” MP Hanin Qaddo told IraqiNews.com. On November 8, the Presidential Board okayed a draft law allocating six seats in provincial councils to ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq. The Shabak people are an ethnic group that lives primarily in the province of Ninewa in Iraq. Their language, 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, they identified themselves as Shiites and a separate ethnic group. Mosul, the capital city of Ninewa, lies 405 km north of Baghdad. SS (P) 1