By Theodore Shoebat
Between 500 to 1000 Christians are being trained by Americans to prepare for war with ISIS to fight them off and also to retake Christian lands that they have invaded. They have formed a militia called Nineveh Plain Protection Units. I did a whole video on this:
According to a very recent report on the militia:
This week, the Assyrian Democratic Movement, the main political party of Assyrians in Iraq, announced the formation of a largely (but not exclusively) Christian militia that hopes to defend Christians from further onslaught of the Islamic State and maybe even contribute to taking back lands that were lost to the Islamist group.
Called the Nineveh Plain Protection Units, the group now has between 500-1000 men in training, said David W. Lazar, a Baghdad native who runs the American Mesopotamian Organization that is helping to support the project.
Lazar said in an interview Wednesday that members of the militia are currently in parts of the Nineveh Plain that are not occupied by ISIS, such as Alquosh and other villages. He said “Americans” are training the recruits but would not say who, specifically, and whether U.S. military personnel are involved. He said the new soldiers have “light arms” but that “we’re not sending” them weapons.
Funding, said Lazar, is coming from the “Assyrian communities in the diaspora,” specifically in the United States and Europe.
Eventually, he said, “we’ll seek help from US and European governments.”
“They will be part of national guard, a project Iraq is putting together,” Lazar said. “We will be pushing for creation of Nineveh Plain Province because it’s our right.”
The move to form a militia is born partially out of frustration. Assyrian Christians feel let down by the Iraqi government and military. They claim that the Kurds who run part of northern Iraq, and their peshmerga militia, who appeared at first to defend Christians from Islamist militants, failed to protect them at the most critical times. And the Assyrians seem to be growing impatient with the US-led coalition that is, apparently, taking a mostly hands-off approach and hoping that airstrikes against the Islamic State will help local forces fight their own battle.
“Kurds told Christians: ‘Relax, stay in your house, we’ll take care of it.’ They got them to hand over their weapons, saying, ‘We can’t have a lot of weapons floating around; that might cause problems,’” said Jeff Gardner, who is helping the American Mesopotamian Organization with public relations.
But the Christians ended up having to abandon their homes anyway.
“If the US and the West don’t want to put boots on the ground, they should boost the locals to have boots on the ground. The Kurds are not the only solution,” Lazar opined. “You can’t have the policy of the United States and Iraq depending on just the Kurds…. The US and the West should also empower the ethnic and religious minorities there—the Assyrians, the Yazidis and others. Then we take ISIS out with the help of the United States. We can do the same thing the Kurds are doing, probably better because the Assyrians and the Yazidis cannot be penetrated by Sunni extremists.”