How Assyrians are driven into collective suicidal ethnogenocide

By Dr. Daniel Sada

A matter requiring urgent international attention, condemnation, and the accountability of all responsible actors

What is unfolding today against the indigenous Assyrian people is no longer a matter of cultural misunderstanding, administrative negligence, or collateral damage of regional instability. It is a systemic, sustained, and multi-actor process of identity destruction, carried out through coercion, misclassification, and structural pressure. 

This process—now increasingly internalized under duress—constitutes collective suicidal ethnogenocide: the eradication of a people’s existence through enforced self-denial rather than overt physical annihilation.

This outcome is neither accidental nor inevitable. It is enabled, normalized, and in critical respects facilitated by ecclesiastical authorities, political parties, the central government of Iraq, and the regional Kurdish government. Together, these actors have produced a convergent system in which Assyrian peoplehood is fragmented, downgraded, and administratively erased, transforming an indigenous nation into a voiceless religious residue.

Assyrians as an Indigenous People under International Law

Under modern international law, the indigenous status of the Assyrian people is neither ambiguous nor unsettled. It is grounded in historical continuity, territorial rootedness, collective peoplehood, and non-dominant status within a modern state—criteria articulated authoritatively in the Martínez Cobo study and codified in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).¹      

UNDRIP affirms Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination (Art. 3), to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social, and cultural institutions (Art. 5), and to belong to an Indigenous community or nation in accordance with the traditions and customs of that community (Art. 33). It further prohibits forced assimilation or destruction of culture, including any action that has the aim or effect of depriving indigenous peoples of their integrity as distinct peoples (Art. 8).

The Assyrian people—whose documented presence in Mesopotamia predates all modern political formations in Iraq—meet every objective criterion of indigeneity. Their catastrophic demographic decline, repeated displacement, and political marginalization throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries only reinforce their non-dominant status.²

Ecclesiastical Authorities and the Ethnicization of Denomination

A central internal mechanism of Assyrian identity destruction is the ethnicization of ecclesiastical denominations. Labels such as Chaldean and Syriac, historically canonical and liturgical designations within Assyrian Christianity, are increasingly presented—by church hierarchies and their political interlocutors—as separate ethnic origins, severed from Assyrian historical continuity.

This transformation is neither neutral nor theological. Churches exercise immense power in vulnerable minority contexts: control over education, historical narrative, political representation, access to humanitarian aid, and mediation with state authorities. When ecclesiastical institutions discourage, marginalize, or penalize Assyrian self-identification—whether through doctrine, social pressure, or administrative practice—they move beyond religious governance into identity engineering.

Such conduct directly conflicts with UNDRIP Articles 11 and 13, which protect Indigenous peoples’ rights to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions, histories, names, and identities. Religious affiliation is voluntary and non-territorial; Indigenous peoples are historical, territorial, and collective. Substituting one for the other constitutes cultural destruction, not pluralism.³

The Regional Kurdish Government: Demographic Engineering and Institutional Erasure

The regional Kurdish government (KRG) bears direct and escalating responsibility for enabling Assyrian ethnogenocide. Numerous human-rights reports and academic studies document persistent patterns of:

1. Assyrian land confiscation and village encroachment
2. Failure to enforce judicial rulings restoring Assyrian property
3. Suppression of Assyrian protests by security forces
4. Systematic Kurdification of local administration, education, and toponymy

These actions violate UNDRIP Articles 25 and 26, which protect indigenous peoples’ rights to maintain their spiritual relationship with traditionally owned lands and to own, use, develop, and control those lands. While often justified as rectifying Baʿathist Arabization, the practical effect is a secondary demographic-engineering process that renders Assyrians politically invisible and territorially expendable.⁴

Most damningly, the KRG persistently treats Assyrians not as an indigenous people but as a sectarian minority, stripping them of land-based rights and normalizing displacement—an approach incompatible with Indigenous law.

The Iraqi State: Constitutional Guarantees and Structural Betrayal

The central government of Iraq cannot evade responsibility by invoking constitutional promises. In practice, Baghdad has consistently failed to recognize Assyrians as an Indigenous people, reducing them instead to a vague “Christian component” within a sectarian framework.

This administrative reduction violates UNDRIP Articles 8, 11, and 33 by:

1. Erasing Assyrian pre-Islamic and pre-Arab historical continuity
2. Removing Assyrians from Indigenous rights regimes
3. Relegating them to discretionary minority-protection mechanisms

United Nations human-rights mechanisms have repeatedly highlighted the gap between Iraq’s constitutional guarantees and their implementation, particularly regarding ethnic and religious minorities.⁵ This persistent misclassification constitutes state-level complicity in identity erasure.

Political Parties and the Weaponization of Fragmentation

Political parties—both regional and national—have exploited ecclesiastical fragmentation for electoral, territorial, and patronage-based advantages. Minority quota systems are manipulated, representation is diluted, and Assyrian political agency is neutralized through controlled proxies.

This practice undermines UNDRIP Article 18, which affirms Indigenous peoples’ right to participate in decision-making through representatives chosen by themselves. Fragmentation is not an accident; it is a strategy.⁶

That many Assyrians now identify primarily as denominational Christians or generic “Christians” is not evidence of voluntary abandonment of indigenous identity.

Internalized Compliance Is Not Consent

That many Assyrians now identify primarily as denominational Christians or generic “Christians” is not evidence of voluntary abandonment of indigenous identity. UNDRIP Article 8 makes clear that forced or induced assimilation has no legitimizing effect, while Article 33 confirms that indigenous peoples themselves—not churches or states—determine identity and membership.

Where indigenous identity is penalized, rendered unsafe, or stripped of material benefit, internal compliance must be understood as identity substitution under domination, not free self-determination.⁷

Comparative Precedents: Why Denial Has Never Invalidated Indigenous Peoples Elsewhere

Global precedents make this unequivocal. UNDRIP was drafted precisely because indigenous peoples elsewhere were coerced into similar patterns of denial without losing their status.

In the Americas, indigenous peoples were stripped of languages, Christianized, and pressured to abandon ancestral names. Entire generations came to identify primarily as Christians or citizens. International law now treats these outcomes as evidence of colonial harm, not voluntary abandonment.

In Russia and Siberia, indigenous peoples were administratively downgraded into folkloric or ethnographic categories, pressured into Russian language and Orthodox identity, and encouraged to self-identify as non-Indigenous. They are nonetheless recognized as indigenous because identity erosion occurred under structural domination, not free choice.

The legal implication is unavoidable: Assyrians do not lose indigenous status through coerced denominational or religious identification.

Heritage Law and the Final Consequence of Erasure: When Names Decide Ownership

The danger of Assyrian identity denial is not confined to human-rights law. It carries irreversible consequences under international heritage law, where names determine attribution, ownership, and protection.

Under the UNESCO World Heritage Convention (1972), cultural heritage is attributed not on the basis of modern demographics or state narratives, but on cultural authorship, historical continuity, and traditional or indigenous association.⁸ The Operational Guidelines for the World Heritage Convention (paras. 77–83) require dossiers to identify the culture and people who created, named, maintained, or ritualized a site, not later occupants or administrative authorities.⁹

In heritage law, naming is juridical, not cosmetic. The name under which a people and its culture are recorded determines:

1. Who is recognized as the cultural author
2. Whose history is preserved

Who has standing in heritage disputes and protection regimes?

For this reason, UNESCO and its advisory body, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), categorically reject retroactive ethnic reassignment. Egyptian monuments are not reclassified as “Arab heritage.” Roman ruins in France are not labeled “Frankish heritage.” Mayan sites are not renamed after modern nationalities.¹⁰

Applied to the Assyrian case, the implications are grave. When Assyrians are re-labeled as mere “Christians,” or when ecclesiastical denominations are falsely elevated into ethnic categories, Assyrian heritage risks being re-attributed away from the Assyrian people—to religious institutions, modern states, or dominant regional narratives.

UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) recognizes misnaming, re-attribution, and loss of traditional names as forms of intangible heritage destruction, particularly where indigenous peoples are concerned.¹¹ This aligns directly with UNDRIP Articles 11–13, which protect indigenous histories, names, toponyms, and cultural narratives.

Thus, Assyrian self-denial does not merely weaken identity claims; it enables the permanent legal reassignment of Assyrian heritage to others. Once recorded incorrectly in heritage regimes, such loss is rarely reversible.

The Internal Cost of Denial: Consequences for Assyrians Who Abandon Their Ancestral Peoplehood

While culpable actors bear primary responsibility, the internal consequences of denial must be faced honestly.

Culturally and psychologically, denial produces identity dislocation—belief without peoplehood, faith without history, survival without dignity. Intergenerational confusion and vulnerability to imposed narratives follow.

Legally and politically, denial weakens standing: indigenous claims go unasserted, heritage is misattributed, and communities are downgraded into weaker minority-rights frameworks. Rights not asserted are never enforced.

For future generations, the danger is existential. Children raised without Assyrian peoplehood inherit political invisibility, cultural amnesia, and dispossession—not by choice, but by inheritance.

Rectification from Within and Resistance Without

Rectification must begin internally, without waiting for permission.

Assyrians must reassert their peoplehood as ancestral, indigenous, and non-negotiable, clearly separating ecclesiastical affiliation from ethnic identity and transmitting Assyrian continuity consciously to future generations.

Externally, rectification demands confrontation, not accommodation—challenging churches that ethnicize denominations, parties that weaponize fragmentation, and governments that institutionalize erasure. Structural injustice requires structural resistance.

An Urgent Call for International Investigation

The convergence of ecclesiastical coercion, political manipulation, administrative erasure, territorial dispossession, heritage misattribution, and internalized denial meets the threshold for international investigation.

This demands scrutiny by UN Special Rapporteurs, independent fact-finding missions, review of Iraqi and KRG practices under UNDRIP Articles 7–13, and assessment of non-state actors, including churches.

Failure to act now risks allowing an indigenous people to disappear without a single shot fired.

The cumulative outcome is not mere marginalization, but ethnogenocide—the destruction of a people as a people

Conclusion: A Final Warning, a Legal Record, and a Choice

What is unfolding against the indigenous Assyrian people today is not confusion, coincidence, or cultural evolution. It is a documentable process of coerced identity destruction, carried out through converging ecclesiastical, political, state, and heritage-administrative mechanisms, and sustained by fear, dependency, and structural domination. The cumulative outcome is not mere marginalization, but ethnogenocide—the destruction of a people as a people—executed without mass graves, but with paperwork, pulpits, party offices, and archival reclassification.

This article has demonstrated that Assyrians meet every criterion of indigeneity under international law, that their forced reclassification violates UNDRIP, that internalized denial under coercion has never invalidated indigenous status anywhere in the world, and that heritage law transforms identity erasure into permanent cultural dispossession.

Responsibility is not abstract. It lies with ecclesiastical authorities who ethnicize denominations, political parties that weaponize fragmentation, the KRG that engineers demographics and erases indigenous standing, and the Iraqi state that reduces an indigenous nation to a “Christian component.”

Equally grave is the internal danger. Identity surrendered today becomes heritage lost tomorrow. Future generations will inherit the consequences, not the choice.

International law still stands. What remains undecided is whether it will be enforced—or allowed to become another record of failure.

This is no longer a question of heritage or theology. It is a question of whether an indigenous people will be allowed to exist as such in the twenty-first century.

Dr Daniel Sada, based in Sydney, is a medical professional and a founding member of the Assyrian Australian Medical Association. He writes on Assyrian issues, offering in-depth analysis and community perspectives.