"The question is no longer why Assyrians seek autonomy after a century of dispossession and restraint. The question is why the United States applies one standard of legitimacy to Kurdish self-rule and another to Assyrian self-rule."
How Autonomy Is Actually Granted
Recent initiatives such as Senator Lindsey Graham’s Save the Kurds Act underscore a hard reality of international politics: moral concern is translated into concrete guarantees only when a partner is deemed strategically coherent and institutionally legible. That standard has been applied generously to Kurdish claims—and systematically denied to Assyrian ones.
For decades, sympathy has defined how the world engages the Assyrian question. Sympathy, however, has never produced protection, power, or permanence. It has produced statements while Assyrian land, population, and authority steadily eroded. Since the First World War, Assyrians aligned themselves with Western powers, fought alongside British forces, and were drawn into the security architecture of the modern Middle East. They paid a severe price for this alignment—enduring genocide, displacement, and repeated abandonment—without converting betrayal into hostility toward their allies.
A Survival Claim Left Unresolved
Assyrian demands for autonomy are not recent or opportunistic. From the collapse of the Ottoman order onward, Assyrian political appeals—whether in post–World War I petitions, League-era advocacy, or post-2003 Iraqi debates—consistently centered on self-administration, land security, and protection from domination by stronger regional actors. Autonomy was never framed as a maximalist ambition. It was articulated as a survival strategy shaped by experience. Its persistence across generations underscores a simple fact: Assyrian autonomy is not theoretical. It is unresolved.
Despite persecution, dispossession, and repeated abandonment, Assyrians did not respond by forming insurgent movements or rebelling against the states in which they lived. Instead, they chose restraint—continuing to serve as soldiers, civil servants, professionals, and stabilizing communities. For better or worse, this decision avoided open rebellion, but it also left Assyrians without leverage in systems that reward force over endurance.
The Minority Trap
Yet justice has never been the constraint. The constraint has been structural. International systems do not reward moral legitimacy alone; they respond to governance capacity, territorial clarity, and institutional form. Peoples presented as coherent political units are engaged as partners. Peoples framed as minorities are managed as humanitarian concerns. Assyrians have been confined to the latter category not because they lack political continuity or consciousness, but because their claims have been denied institutional expression.
The Kurdish “Stability” Narrative
This bias is most clearly exposed by the claim that Kurdish autonomy is uniquely “stabilizing.” Kurdish political history across the region tells a more complex story. In the 1990s, the KDP and the PUK fought a brutal civil war in northern Iraq that fractured Kurdish society and cost thousands of lives. At the height of that conflict, the KDP invited Saddam Hussein’s forces into Erbil in 1996 to defeat its Kurdish rivals, while the PUK relied on Iranian backing—demonstrating how factional survival could override national aspirations.
In Syria, Kurdish forces led by the YPG have alternated between confrontation with Damascus and tactical accommodation, reflecting unresolved divisions over allegiance and end goals. In Turkey, the decades-long conflict between the state and the PKK has destabilized entire regions and fractured Kurdish political life. These episodes do not reflect a uniquely coherent or restraint-driven political tradition. They reflect recurring patterns of factionalism, ideological rivalry, and survival-driven alignment—conditions that did not prevent Western powers from backing Kurdish self-rule.
Patronage and Power
Crucially, Kurdish political power did not emerge organically. It was actively constructed through sustained external sponsorship. In Iraq, the U.S.-led intervention of 1991—through the no-fly-zone and Operation Provide Comfort—created the security conditions that allowed Kurdish authorities to consolidate territorial control and develop governing institutions. In Syria, U.S. military protection, training, arms, intelligence, and diplomatic cover enabled Kurdish-led forces to entrench de facto autonomy during the campaign against ISIS.
Kurdish autonomy did not precede American backing; it was enabled by it. To credit Kurdish political success to inherent stability while ignoring this sustained sponsorship is to mistake patronage for inevitability.
Assyrian autonomy, by contrast, is portrayed as destabilizing—despite Assyrians being indigenous to their homeland and possessing a continuous historical presence predating every modern state in the region. One people’s internal discord is excused as political complexity; another people’s restraint is treated as political insufficiency.
This exposes a second fallacy: that Kurdish claims possess greater political substance because of numbers. Political substance in alliances is not a demographic metric. It is a function of organization, alignment, and external backing. A superpower can elevate a small population into a decisive ally. If sheer numbers determined political value, the United States would scarcely have regarded Israel—a small state in a hostile region—as strategically indispensable.
Assyrians have already demonstrated this capacity for alignment. Following the 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq, Assyrian communities supported coalition efforts locally and formed protection forces to defend their towns amid the collapse of state security and the rise of sectarian violence. This was operational participation, not symbolic alignment.
Article 125 and the Question of Land
It is here that Article 125 of the Iraqi Constitution must be confronted honestly. On paper, it recognizes the administrative, cultural, and political rights of Assyrians. In practice, its ambiguity, lack of implementing legislation, and absence of enforcement mechanisms have rendered it inert. Rather than enabling self-administration, Article 125 has functioned as a procedural shield—invoked to deflect substantive demands while offering no legal pathway to realize them.
This failure is not accidental. It reflects a deeper contradiction embedded in the autonomy debate itself: rights articulated without territorial substance cannot be realized. Article 125 gestures toward self-administration while deliberately avoiding the material foundations—land, jurisdiction, and authority—required for self-rule. Any serious implementation must therefore move beyond symbolism. Meaningful realization of Article 125 would require genuine Assyrian self-administration, territorial authority, land governance, security arrangements, and accountable Assyrian political representation. Autonomy without land is administrative fiction.
Autonomy Without Land Is Not Autonomy
Any credible discussion of Assyrian autonomy that avoids the question of land is, at best, incomplete—and at worst, complicit in legitimizing dispossession. Autonomy cannot exist in the abstract. It must be territorial, contiguous, and rooted in the restoration of lands confiscated through decades of political coercion, demographic engineering, and administrative absorption in northern Iraq.
The return of Assyrian lands seized or controlled by Kurdish parties and authorities is not a maximalist demand; it is a prerequisite for meaningful self-rule. An autonomous Assyrian region that excludes historically Assyrian towns, villages, and agricultural lands merely institutionalizes loss under the language of reform.
If autonomy is to be more than symbolic—if it is to provide security, governance, and permanence—then confiscated Assyrian lands must be returned and incorporated into the Assyrian autonomous unit. Anything less does not correct injustice; it ratifies it.
The Double Standard
The burden of justification must be reversed. The question is no longer why Assyrians seek autonomy after a century of dispossession and restraint. The question is why the United States applies one standard of legitimacy to Kurdish self-rule and another to Assyrian self-rule.
Moral legitimacy remains necessary—but it has never been sufficient. What Assyrians seek is not sympathy, but political recognition. Autonomy remains the only framework capable of delivering it.
