While 19 candidates are competing for the five quota seats, Assyrian political parties are officially boycotting the elections in protest against the Iraqi government’s refusal to close a loophole that allows non-Assyrian groups to exploit their representation.
Washington has empowered an ethno-nationalist project that marginalizes the indigenous population and enforces the kind of oppression the U.S. claims to oppose," an Assyrian political figure has argued.
Increased security and better economic opportunities, among other factors, could more than quadruple the Assyrian population of the Tur Abdin Region, predicts the Assyrian analyst Ilhan Aydin.
Two leading Assyrian organizations, the Assyrian Democratic Organization and The Assyrian Monitor for Human Rights, have denounced and condemned the closure of Assyrian schools in northeast Syria's Gozarto Region by Kurdish militants.
A Turkish MP from a party with Islamic ideology has posed a question to the vice president asking why the construction of a mosque in the Assyrian village of Zaz has been stopped.
The Kurdish group in control of northeast Syria's Gozarto Region has once again closed down Assyrian schools by force in an attempt to impose its own curriculum.
Activists behind the initiative to establish what they call an Assyrian parliament believe they have taken a historic step. Critics, however, argue it is merely an old, failed formula in new clothing.
