The ISIL Takfiri terrorists have abducted over 400 Turkmens in various parts of Iraq, the Turkmen Rescue Foundation says.
Nearly 450 members of the Muslim community, among them 50 children and 70 women and girls, are taken hostage by ISIL, the rights agency said.
Akram al-Bayati, chairman of the foundation, said the ISIL extremists kidnapped the Turkmens from Iraq’s northern provinces of Kirkuk, Nineveh and Salahuddin as well as the eastern province of Diyala.
He further called upon the government in Baghdad, the Iraqi parliament as well as international organizations to work for the release of the abductees.
The remarks come as a senior Turkmen politician has said some 10,000 Iraqi Turkmen tribesmen have joined the volunteer Shia fighters to battle ISIL.
“Seven thousand Turkmens from Tal Afar in the northern province of Nineveh, more than 2,000 others from the town of Tuz Khormato in the province of Salahuddin, and hundreds from Bashir village in Kirkuk province have joined Shia forces,” Torhan al-Mufti said on January 28.
In late August 2014, Iraqi army soldiers, backed by thousands of Shia volunteers and Kurdish fighters, liberated the northern town of Amerli, located about 180 kilometers (110 miles) north of the capital, Baghdad, from the ISIL Takfiri terrorists.
The residents of the small Shia Turkmen town had been under the ISIL siege since mid-June.
ISIL started its campaign of terror in Iraq in early June last year. The heavily-armed terrorists took control of the city of Mosul before sweeping through parts of the country’s Sunni Arab heartland.
The militants have been carrying out horrific acts of violence, including public decapitations, against all Iraqi communities such as Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians.
Iraqi soldiers, police units, Kurdish forces, Shia volunteers and Sunni tribesmen have been jointly battling ISIL over the past months and they have managed to clear a number of areas in the country of the terrorists.
