Antipathy towards Iraq’s Indigenous Assyrians

Assyrians in Iraq are an ethnic and linguistic minority group, indigenous to Upper Mesopotamia. Assyrians in Iraq are those Assyrians still residing in the country of Iraq, and those in the Assyrian diaspora who are of Iraqi-Assyrian heritage. The Assyrians are typically Syriac-speaking Christians who claim descent from Assyria, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, dating back to 2500 BC in ancient Mesopotamia.
Iraq's indigenous people can't face another conflict. Despite the Islamic State's retreat, Assyrians fear for their security in the Nineveh Plains. Most of Bartella's population before the 2014 Islamic State offensive, is Assyrian-part of an ethnic community indigenous to northern Iraq that is predominantly Christian and the last Aramaic-speaking group in the world. Over the last two decades, punctuated by the Iraq War and rise of the Islamic State, the population of Assyrians in Iraq has declined by a staggering 90 percent: from an estimated 1.5 million in 2003 to just over 150,000 today.

The Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq have been the linchpin of Assyrian life for centuries. While it has always been a diverse area-many Yazidis live in the region-it was the last major concentration of Assyrians in Iraq before 2014. In the period immediately following the defeat of the Islamic State, Iraq's central government could have prioritized the return of its Indigenous peoples. Instead, it returned to the same security arrangement that led to an Assyrian exodus from the plains in 2014: a U.S.-supported balance of Arab and Kurdish forces claiming the plains as their own.

The Assyrian exodus from Iraq refers to the mass flight and expulsion of ethnic Assyrians from Iraq, a process which was initiated from the beginning of Iraq War in 2003 and continues to this day. Leaders of Iraq's Assyrian community estimate that over two-thirds of the Iraqi Assyrian population may have fled the country or been internally displaced since the U.S led invasion in 2003 until 2011. Reports suggest that whole neighbourhoods of Assyrians have cleared out in the cities of Baghdad and Basra, and that Sunni insurgent groups and militias have threatened Assyrians. Following the campaign of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in northern Iraq in August 2014, one quarter of the remaining Iraqi Assyrians fled the Jihadists, finding refuge in Turkey and Kurdistan Region.

The violence faced by Assyrians has led to a drop in their numbers in Iraq from at least 800000 in 2003 to 400000 in 2011. The 2009 Catholic Almanac puts the numbers much higher - a drop from 1.5 million mostly Assyrians in Iraq in 2003 to just 500000 in 2009. Some estimate the updated number of Assyrians in Iraq at just 300000. The UN High Commission for Refugees estimated in 2007 that one third of 1.8 million Iraqi refugees were Assyrians. A similar percentage of the 1.6 million internally displaced within Iraq in 2007 were likely Assyrians, many of whom had fled Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul to the relatively stable Kurdistan Region.

A 1950 CIA report on Iraq showed that Assyrians comprised 4.9% of the Iraqi population during the 1940s.The report goes on and states 20% of the Assyrians live in Baghdad and 60% in Mosul.The Iraqi Minorities Council and the Minority Rights Group International estimated that Iraq's pre-war Assyrian population was 8,00,000.

Assyrians in post-Saddam Iraq have faced high rate of persecutionby fundamentalist Sunnis since the beginning of the Iraq War. By early August 2004 this persecution included church bombings, and fundamentalist groups' enforcement of Muslim codes of behaviour upon Christians, e.g., banning alcohol, forcing women to wear hijab. The violence against the community has led to the exodus of perhaps as much as half of the community. While Assyrians only made just over 5% of the total Iraqi population before the war, according to the UN, Assyrians are over-represented among the Iraqi refugees (as much as 13%) who are stranded in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. By 2011, a large number of Assyrians had found refuge in their villages in Nineveh Plains and the Kurdistan Region. This led some Assyrians and Iraqi and foreign politicians to call for an Assyrian autonomous region in those areas.

Starting from 2013, however, the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant led to ethnic cleansing of the Assyrian people, including Assyrian refugees, in Iraq and Syria. This intensified following their Northern Iraq offensive in mid-2014.Most of the land that ISIS conquered in Northern Iraq was part of the Nineveh Plains, which had been the only area left in Iraq that was safe for the Assyrians. By August 2014, the Christian population of the Nineveh Plains was reduced by 60%, and almost all of the main population centres of the region were lost to ISIS.

Assyrians have criticized the kurdification of the school curricula, and have complained about the confiscation and occupation of Assyrian lands, and "that the Kurds invent new and impossible laws when the legitimate owners ask for their lands." Assyrians have criticized that while Kurds are very well funded, the Assyrian Christians receive almost no funding for their schools. Assyrians have also said that Kurds have modified and falsified school textbooks and changed traditional Christian names to Kurdish names. In textbooks it was even claimed that some biblical figures were Kurdish.

Internally displaced Assyrians cite mistrust of security forces as the primary impediment to their return, so it is no surprise that the Nineveh Plain Protection Units-the only force made up of locals from the plains-has return rates in areas it controls significantly higher than in areas secured by Kurdish forces or Iran-backed militias alone and higher return rates than all areas controlled by other forces in the plains combined, according to a June assessment by the Assyrian Policy Institute (API).

Iraq's Assyrians cannot endure another antipathy. If Iraq's Indigenous peoples are to have a future, there must be a reckoning with both Iran-backed militias and the Kurdistan Democratic Party's role in undermining the only option that has yielded results: empowering local Assyrians to defend themselves within proper legal authority, providing them a chance at survival in a land devoid of equality for generations.
Avik Gangopadhyay, an author, critic and columnist, writes from Kolkata, India