In the Middle East, a claim to the past is a claim on the future. In the case of the Assyrian people of Iraq, however, no matter how profound their claims of belonging to the history – both ancient and modern – of their homeland, their future is in grave peril.

Contrary to the racialist mythologies espoused by many of the proponents of Arabism in the 20^th century, the Assyrians are a discrete people, with a heritage that pre-dated and then ran simultaneous to Arab history. In fact, a 2007 University of California study - concludes, as several similar studies have, that “Assyrians… have a distinct genetic profile that distinguishes their population from any another population.” Assyrians speak modern dialects of Syriac, heir to the Aramaic of Jesus, and lingua franca of much of Mesopotamia prior to Arabic.

The Assyrian Church of the East, one of the most ancient communions in the world, spread as far as India (in 300 AD) and Mongolia. Assyrian Christianity bespeaks not merely a Christian identity, but is a testament to a cultural continuity which can claim among its achievements the translation of seminal texts of ancient Greek philosophy, mathematics, and science into Syriac and then Arabic in the sixth through ninth centuries AD, bequeathing a legacy to the Arabs which would form an intellectual basis for their burgeoning civilization.

The near-miraculous continued existence of Assyrian Christianity is also testament to the resilience of its adherents in the face of a staggering range of vigorous persecutions at the hands of maniacs as varied as the Zoroastrian supremacist Yazdgerd II (438 – 457) to the Turkish led, often Kurdish- implemented genocidal cleansing of Assyrians from Anatolia in the early 20^th century under the guidance of Enver Pasha and the ‘Young Turks’, a cabal of Turkish fascists who dreamt of a ‘purely’ Turkish Turkey.

In the aftermath of that particular convulsion, the Assyrians who moved south to the inchoate state of Iraq faced further turmoil. In the guise of ‘The Assyrian Levies’, the Assyrians had formed an integral element of the British mandate’s military force in Mesopotamia. The pledge of nationhood given to the Assyrians by the British in exchange for their services to the British Empire – which included suppressing revolts of the Kurds and Arabs – was revoked by the departing British, and the Assyrians were subsequently abandoned by all foreign powers and bodies, including the League of Nations, who in 1933 definitively rejected any conception of ‘the Assyrian people’, and with it, any claim they might have to political autonomy or nationhood. Fierce divisions emerged within the Assyrian leadership. Patriarch Mar Shimun, a defiant Assyrian nationalist, was deported from Iraq in August 1933. The Simele massacre, in which 3000 Assyrians were slaughtered, occurred in the same year, and was an empathic statement of revanchist Arab nationalism. Thus routed and divested of their political leadership, Assyrian nationalism suffered a potentially terminal blow.

Affiliation with western powers continues to form an ostensible reason for mistrust and persecution of Assyrians. This is a blend of anti-Christian prejudice – a sense that as Christians, Assyrians will invariably side with the ‘Crusaer’ West against Muslim interests – and historically rooted dogma. In the past few decades, however, it is the Kurds, rightful beneficiaries of political protections since the campaign of extermination waged against them by the psychopathic Hussein family in the 1980s, who have primarily benefitted from Western intervention. As I will argue later, however, this protection has created unjust and problematic iniquities in the distribution of power within the new Iraqi state.

As with so many other Middle Eastern peoples, the contemporary nation-state, with its markers defined crudely by the capricious outcomes of blood-feud, or precisely but hazardously by the imaginations of Western state-crafters, is a poor guide to an understanding of the geographical history of Assyrians. They have historical presences in Iran and Syria, for example, as well as Iraq. The rest of this article will, however, concern the contemporary plight of Assyrians in Iraq, which many Assyrians regard as their ancestral homeland and which continues to house the largest quantity of Assyrians of any nation – if we include the recent spate of refugees who have fled to Syria - as well as being the home of their most torturous present suffering.

The toppling of Saddam Hussein has led to recognition of the Assyrians as a distinct entity for the first time in Iraq’s modern history. The Iraqi constitution guarantees (article 125) “the administrative, political, cultural, and educational rights of the various nationalities, such as Turkomen, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and all other constituents, and this shall be regulated by law.” The cruel historical irony, however, is that while the de jure rights of Assyrians have been thus enshrined, the de facto reality of the community’s status is so treacherous as to render this recognition meaningless.

Before the Iraq War, the Christian population of Iraq numbered around 1.4 million. They now number 400,000. What happened to them? And where did they go?