“They have already killed many of us. What do we have to fear?” Lt. Col. Lukman Ibrahim responded when I asked him if he was afraid to openly communicate with an Israeli in a recent long-distance phone conversation from Tel Aviv to Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq, near the Syrian border. Ibrahim, a Yazidi militia officer, is hoping to obtain military aid from the State of Israel.
“The Arab countries do not recognize us, nor do they recognize you,” he said. “They are telling us that we are infidels. Why should we be afraid to talk to you, when even neighboring Arab countries have become our enemies? We regard you as a friendly state, with an opportunity for relations on the basis of neutrality and respect. We do not want more than that.”
Ibrahim, a journalist by profession, serves as an assistant to Marwan Elias Badl, one of the senior field commanders of the Sinjar Protection Forces, the Yazidi militia established ad hoc in August 2014 to halt the Islamic State (IS) onslaught against Yazidi population centers west of Mosul. The militia numbers some 12,000 fighters, most of them untrained, ordinary men who rushed to take up arms to thwart IS' designs. A few of them are rank-and-file fighters, while some are officers with the Kurdish peshmerga. According to internal estimates, the IS militants killed thousands in their pogrom against the Yazidis. About 5,000 Yazidis are still being held by IS.
The Yazidis have no formal relations with Israel, nor an organized leadership. Yet they need aid, in particular military assistance, and they have chosen to make a public plea for help. “We appeal to the Israeli government and its leader to step in and help this nation, which loves the Jewish people,” said Ibrahim. “We would be most grateful for the establishment of military ties — for instance, the training of fighters and the formation of joint teams. We are well aware of the circumstances the Israelis are in, and of the suffering they have endured at the hands of the Arabs ever since the establishment of their state. We, too, are suffering on account of them.”
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