Assyrians reject ‘minority’ status as erasure

Shafaq News – Istanbul / Baghdad

Labeling Assyrians as a “minority” in Turkiye and Iraq reflects a strategy to marginalize indigenous peoples and strip them of historical claims, the Assyrian International News Agency reported.

A report by the Agency noted that after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s republic imposed a uniform Turkish identity that recast Assyrians—one of Mesopotamia’s oldest communities—as outsiders, enforcing assimilation, displacement, and exclusion to break their link to ancestral lands.

In Iraq, British mandate officials and later Arab nationalist regimes adopted the same label to diminish Assyrian influence, disregarding their role in building the Iraqi state and enabling Arabization and cultural suppression by the mid-20th century.

This categorization, the report stressed, was never neutral but crafted to erase indigenous status. Today, Assyrian activists are challenging that legacy by rejecting the “minority” label and reaffirming their identity as a foundational people of Mesopotamia.

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