The Assyrians, an ethnic group indigenous to the Middle East, are a threatened minority today. Within the last two centuries they have withstood the horrors of strategic genocidal campaigns on their ancestral lands that have led to their continual persecution and forced exile.
A recurring but often overlooked problem in the Middle East is the oppression of Assyrians by Kurds. Kurdish oppression of Assyrians has a long-standing history, most notably during the Assyrian genocide by the Ottomans in 1915–1918, where many Kurdish tribes assisted in the Ottoman campaigns of violence against Assyrians, Armenians, and other Christians.
These genocidal campaigns have yet to be globally recognized, yet their lingering effects continue today in more insidious ways due to Kurdish aggression.
Land
As Kurds themselves face persecution from both Turkey and Iran, their violence against Assyrians has only intensified through excessive land theft. Assyrians today face complete disenfranchisement in their indigenous homeland, notably in northern Iraq—known as Assyria to Assyrians.
The Kurdification of Assyria, which refers to the surge of Kurdish supremacy at the expense of Assyrian identity, culture, and presence in historically Assyrian locations, is and has been happening for decades.
Iraq's Nahla Valley, located within the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, is historically a predominantly Assyrian Christian area; today, there are only eight Assyrian villages remaining. The region initially had 23 Assyrian villages that were ethnically cleansed; the luscious valley is vulnerable to ongoing land thefts by Kurds—a longstanding issue.
The Assyrian Aid Society of Iraq has documented a list of land grabs by Kurds submitted to the U.N. over the past several decades. In 1963, the Zibari Clan, a prominent Kurdish tribe, stole 13.5 acres of land from the village of Cham Rabatkeh. Later, in 1991, entire Assyrian villages such as Qarawola, Yousif Ava, and Shwadin were overtaken by neighboring Kurdish tribes.
Qashkawa, Zhouli, and Cham Rabatkeh are prominent Assyrian Christian villages in the Nahla Valley still undergoing relentless land grabs. The Foreign Policy Journal stated that three-fourths of Qashkawa's territory was already stolen by Kurdish settlers back in 2019.
In 2020, 117 Assyrian families in the Nahla Valley lost access to 75 percent of their lands after the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq reversed a law intended to protect Assyrian ownership.
The Asayish, Kurdistan's official security organization, regularly targets Assyrians in the Nahla Valley, coercing them to sign fake concessions.
Sarah, an Assyrian American human rights advocate, has been visiting friends in the Nahla Valley for the last few years. She said these coercion tactics are nothing new and that the KRG and influential Kurdish families are known to fabricate fake deeds to Assyrian lands to falsely claim ownership.
In April 2021, the KRG confiscated 1,000 dunams (100 hectares) of agricultural land belonging to local Assyrian farmers in the village of Ankawa, northern Iraq. These land thefts have no end in sight, slowly chipping away at what is left of Assyria. Erbil International Airport was also forcefully built by the KRG on land owned by Assyrians without compensation.
The KRG's oppression of Assyrians has also masked itself as the building of water infrastructure projects in Assyrian regions. The Bakrman Dam is currently being constructed as part of a wider project by the KRG involving two other dams, Dalga and Mandawa in Dohuk, an ancient Assyrian city with a prominent Assyrian population.
While the KRG proposed these dams as water management projects, the building of dams in civilian areas is a classic colonial method of forced displacement, as many Assyrian villages are at risk of being destroyed and entirely engulfed by the dam's waters.
Organizations like Save The Tigris, a civil advocacy platform for water justice in Iraq, have previously reported multiple dam failures in the Kurdistan region. The federal Iraqi government has made it clear that construction of these dams was not approved.
Language and Identity
The struggle to preserve Assyrian language and heritage is at a crossroads.
In 2018, Kurdish authorities in Syria shut down private Assyrian schools in Qamishli; the reasoning was that the curriculum didn't promote Kurdish nationalist ideology.
Just like in Iraq, the erasure of Assyrian identity and education is prevalent in neighboring Syria, where Assyrians are often purposefully referred to as "Kurdish Christians," "Arab Christians," or just "Christians."
America's support is abundantly clear when it comes to the Kurds in the Middle East. The narrative about Kurds implementing multi-ethnic, feminist, and open-minded governing systems in Iraq and Syria, allied with the West in the fight against ISIS, is untrue.
Kurdish influence in Western media has resulted in the complete erasure and disregard of the Assyrians, whom they continue to slowly ethnically cleanse—forcing them to leave their ancestral lands for the West. Now, as the population of Assyrians in the Middle East post-genocide continues to drastically drop, how are we able to address this ongoing ethnic cleansing as the world remains overwhelmingly unaware?
Regardless of governmental or political disputes, most Kurdish authorities in Syria and Iraq align on one thing—the Assyrians are not entitled to their lands, and it is with great intent that they aim to erase their presence.
Before 2003, there were 1.6 million Assyrians in Iraq; before 2011, there were 500,000 Assyrians in Syria. Today, there are fewer than 300,000 Assyrians in Iraq, and 250,000 in Syria.
Assyrians continue to face systematic dispossession as well as threats against their existence in their homeland. The preservation of their history and heritage is vital.
As the Kurdification of Assyria continues, will the world finally speak up and do something before it's too late?
Mohammed Ahmad is a Palestinian American journalist, writer, and actor based in Los Angeles. In addition to Newsweek, his work has appeared in Yellow Scene Magazine and The Forge. He is the co-founder of Poets for Palestine.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.