Babaker Baderkhan Shawkat Zebari () was the Chief-of-Staff of the New Iraqi Army from 2003 to 2015 and a General of Iraq.
Biography[]
Babaker Baderkhan Shawkat Zebari was born in Mosul, Nineveh Governorate, Iraq to a family of Sunni Muslim Kurds. Zebari initially served in the Iraqi Army, but in 1973 he defected to Mustafa Barzani's Kurdish rebels, and he fought in the Second Iraqi-Kurdish War and the March Uprisings of 1991 against Ba'athist Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein. In 2003, he became a General of the New Iraqi Army (with connections to United States and Israel) and served as Chief-of-Staff until 2015, and he assisted MNF-I coalition forces during the Iraq War while also leading Iraqi government forces in the early stages of the Iraqi Civil War until 2015, when he left office as Chief-of-Staff of the New Iraqi Army.