Iraqi Shebeks, a secretive and forgotten Iraqi minority, are against Kurdish moves to annex their areas, their Parliamentary representative said.

Haneen Qaddo, the community's only Member of Parliament, accused the Kurds of forcibly changing the ethnicity of his group and deploying their Peshmerga or militias in their areas.

Many Shebeks see themselves as an independent ethnic minority and resist attempts have them included as Kurds in Iraqi counts.

"They are trying to impose the Kurdish indentity on the sons of the Shebek nationality," Qaddo told a news conference.

There about 100,000 Shebeks who mainly speak Turkish but some of them speak Arabic and also Kurdish.

They live in more than 20 villages mainly in the east of the northern city of Mosul.

They are Shiites and most of them are ardent supporters of Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Qaddo said these villages, which Kurdish militias now control, should remain within the borders of the Province of Nineveh of which Mosul is the capital.

The Kurds have extended their borders to scores of villages and towns some of them just a few kilometers from Mosul.

Most of these villages and towns are inhabited by minorities like Shebeks, Yezidis and Christians of different denominations.

www.azzaman.com