In the Shadow of God
Iraqi-Assyrians, Iran and the Politics of Patronage
IN THE SHADOWS
The oft-quoted line by policymakers, analysts and pundits alike, “everything in the Middle-East is connected to everything else”, always seems to be proven true when extraordinary bouts of violence or instability set off a domino effect across the whole region. The world’s attention is currently on Gaza and Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack on October 7th 2023. However, as Israel continues its siege of an already massacred population, Iran has been moving its pieces in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq for years in preparation for another chapter of violence for the region. It is here in the shadows where the fate of minority groups are steadily and routinely crushed.
In Iraq in particular, Iran wields considerable power through both the government and parallel and political and military structures set up to offset any expressions of a still-elusive Iraqi sovereignty. Assyrians, inclusive of Chaldean and Syriac Christian sects, were largely off the menu for Iran before 2014. The only areas of Iraq where Assyrians maintained any meaningful demographic presence was in their traditional homelands comprising of the northern provinces of Nineveh (specifically in the Nineveh Plain), Nohadra (Dohuk) and Arbil, after being mostly driven out of Iraq’s major cities through ethnically and religiously motivated violence and systemic harassment and discrimination after 2003.
While Nineveh remains a ‘contested territory’, the provinces of Nohadra and Arbil are under the feudalist control of Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the dominant party comprising of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
Given the volatile political environment in Baghdad, Iran’s influence, and potential to secure energy contracts directly after only a few handshakes, the US were always far more interested in working with the hereditary rulers they had propped up in the Kurdistan Region. After all, the US had expended considerable resources and effort fashioning the Kurdistan Region into another outpost for themselves in the region after the no-fly zone was established during the Ba’ath Party’s death throes. With this and Assyrian demographics in mind, it should not surprise anyone that Western states have been traditionally unmoved by Assyrians having their rights and political aspirations traditionally undermined and co-opted by their client, the KDP. The alternative to this arrangement, the KDP had always argued to the US and other Western states, was letting Nineveh fall under Iran’s sphere of influence.
The KDP had served these warnings up while committing a litany of human rights abuses against Assyrians and adjacent minority communities ranging from assassinations, land seizures and election fraud — all things Western democracies were cognisant of in real time, but turned a blind eye to in favour of larger objectives. This dynamic changed during the fight against ISIS.
When the Iran-made and sponsored Badr Organisation in Iraq saw the opportunity to recruit and deploy its own militias to fill the security vacuum left by the fleeing Iraqi Army and Peshmerga across Nineveh, they did just that. In the context of deploying ‘Christians’ in Nineveh, this took the shape of the Babylon Brigades — Brigade 50 — headed by Rayan Kildani, and overwhelmingly consisted of Arab conscripts from Iraq’s Shia-majority southern provinces. A political arm was quickly created to sponsor it too, and Iran’s goals were clear.
One of the goals involved displacing established Christian Assyrian leadership figures, both political and religious, who did not fall in line with Iran’s plans inside Iraq. On July 2nd this year, Iraqi President Rashid issued a decree revoking Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphaël I Sako’s authority as head of the Christian endowment, declaring it “illegal” and “unconstitutional”. A few tense weeks later, Sako published an open letter in response declaring his withdrawal from Baghdad to Arbil on July 15th after an order was issued summoning him to court.
Sako had been recognised as Head of Christian Affairs in Iraq since 2013, when the late Jalal Talabani, former President of Iraq and founder of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), had issued a decree formalising Sako’s authority. Following the court summons, Chaldean Catholics took to the streets in Ankawa, a Christian town in close proximity to Arbil, in support of their Patriarch and protested against his treatment in Baghdad.
Sako, born in Zakho in 1948, a town in today’s Kurdistan Region, has been a central figure in Iraq for Christians, residing in both Baghdad and Mosul through the horrors of the Ba’ath regime and the ensuing violence after its toppling. He drew international attention to the plight of Christians in Iraq when Pope Francis ordained him as a cardinal of the Catholic Church in 2018, while his flock in the Nineveh Plain were trying to rebuild their lives after their liberation from ISIS a year prior.
In the public statement announcing his withdrawal from Baghdad, Sako referred to the “deliberate and humiliating campaign led by the Babylon Brigades” against him and Christians in Iraq. “My summoning to court continues as being ‘accused’, while the abuser is known, free and protected”. Continuing, Sako publicly names the “abusers” as members of the Babylon Brigade, namely Rayan Kildani and members of his family, as well as what they hope to achieve with the presidential decree. Kildani and his associates all fall firmly within the parallel hierarchy of the pro-Iran segments of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) and part of the Badr Organisation, which wields considerable influence in Iraqi political and security affairs.
Sako ended his statement:
“It is unfortunate that we in Iraq live in the midst of a wide network of self-interest, narrow factionalism, and hypocrisy that has produced an unprecedented political, national and moral chaos, which is rooted by now more and more, so may God help the helpless Christians and Iraqis.”
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The move to strip Sako of his authority and instigate his relocation, while referred to as “unprecedented” by Sako himself, glosses over horrific chapters of early Iraqi history. In 1932, buoyed by independence from the United Kingdom, Arab leaders hand-picked by Western imperial powers sought to consolidate their own fledgling sovereignty through demonstrations of violence and repression. By 1933, Christian Assyrians were increasingly demonised as fifth columnists within Iraq for arguing for more favourable settlement conditions after their genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks and Kurds and absorption of Hakkari, Turkey, into a newly demarcated Turkish state instead of Iraq. Assyrians were eventually massacred again in their thousands by the Iraqi Army and its Kurdish tribal auxiliaries in what is now known as the Simele Massacre. Just prior to the bloodshed, the uncooperative Assyrian Patriarch of the Church of the East, Mar Shimun XXIII Eshai, was exiled to Cyprus, and the position of Christians in Iraq was redefined by more compliant senior clerical figures who were threatened and coerced into celebrating the massacre of their kin.
In Iraq and the wider Middle East then as it is today, incentives are regularly created for Christian Assyrians to distance themselves from their Assyrian identity, and punishments lie in wait for those who reject them.
What Sako is facing now represents one of the many aftershocks that have been felt by Christians of all sects in Iraq since these tragic events. While there is clear historical precedent for removing senior Christian leaders in Iraq when it is advantageous for Iraqi leaders, there is also a chronically overlooked chain of events that have enabled Kildani and the Babylon Brigades to increase their influence in Iraq to this extent. As such, the reasons President Rashid had for issuing the decree remain vague if taken at face value, but reveal the bleak political realities of Iraq when examined more closely — starting with the figure of Rayan Kildani himself.
RAYAN KILDANI
On the same day Sako had published his statement, Rayan Kildani issued a snide response commenting on Sako’s relocation to Arbil as an effort “to escape facing the Iraqi judiciary in cases brought against him.” Kildani, a Christian from Alqosh, a Chaldean Catholic town currently occupied by KDP peshmerga, was a little-known figure in Iraq until ISIS metastasised into a territorial force in 2014. Up until then, all that was really known about Kildani’s activities consisted of criminality involving property theft and extortion in Baghdad and being close to the Badr Organisation which was in the process of undermining and hollowing out Iraq’s political and security institutions. With ISIS, his sponsors had finally found a specific use for him: to represent their interests as a loyal Christian proxy inside Iraq as well as to external observers, and more long-term, to falsely position Christian interests inside Iraq as being best furthered by a pro-Iran agenda.
This mirrored the KDP’s long-standing practice of fielding Christian political proxies to further their own policies locally and internationally, setting up entire Christian political parties to muddy and displace the voice of independent ones, and standing-up tokenistic security forces in Iraq’s contested territories in a bid to invent facts on the ground that did not exist. Electorally within the KRG, this even inspired Kurdish rivals including the PUK and Islamic parties to repeatedly call for the abolition of the minority quota given relentless interference and co-optation by the KDP. After the elections in 2018, senior KDP minister Hemin Hawrami shamelessly boasted on Twitter that the KDP “mobilised Christians to win 2 out of 5 seats of the Christian quota” through their proxies, and including these seats in the KDP’s overall tally of seats won.
Observing these tactics since 2005, the Badr Organisation elected to play the same game. Having been trusted to lead a superficially Christian militia comprising of Arab conscripts against ISIS alongside their other forces, Kildani rose to prominence as its leader within the PMF umbrella that was eating Iraq’s security infrastructure from the inside out. Their stated purpose was to combat ISIS, but much more long-term, political objectives were involved.
Given the catastrophic failure of Iraq’s formal security forces, many Western political leaders, analysts and observers quietly accepted the proposed necessity of militias like the Babylon Brigades and adjacent groups in the fight against ISIS. At best, this readiness to find heroes amid a crisis naively overlooked the risks involved in legitimising their position in the security map of the state. At worst however, many even promoted their profile and ran apologetics for their abuses of power throughout the fighting that followed. If there was any doubt left as to Kildani’s agenda and allegiances, he was quoted in pro-Iran media in 2015, “after Iraq is freed from the Da’esh pigs, the Babylon Units will break into two factions: one will go to Syria and the other to Yemen.” Hardly the objectives of an individual leading a militia that is prioritising the needs of his own community in Iraq.
Finally in July 2019, the US sanctioned Kildani for serious human rights abuses, including being filmed maiming detainees and property theft in the liberated Assyrian towns in the Nineveh Plain, but this did nothing to impede him from increasing the pace in which he was seeking to dominate Christian politics in Iraq.
HALLOWED BE THY GAME
With the territorial defeat of ISIS and the ongoing normalisation of PMF forces embedded within the security forces of Iraq, Kildani’s sponsors in the Badr Organization proceeded to expand their influence through their political conduits via the Iraqi Elections in 2018 and 2021. Assyrians in Iraq are given five quota seats in both Arbil and Baghdad parliaments. Quotas, generally understood as mechanisms to ensure minority participation in representative democracies, became another tool to exploit and oppress minorities by co-opting them through political patronage systems. In an Iraqi context, these quota seats are rendered “cheaper” than regular seats in terms of number of votes needed to win given ever-shrinking Christian demographics across the state. Targeting these quota seats through proxies is a more efficient way for dominant Kurdish and Arab parties to secure additional seats and boost their bargaining power in the formation of national governing coalitions. This structural dynamic means there is a state-wide incentive to drive Christians out of the country in order to render their seats even cheaper and easier to steal.
The election in 2018 should have been alarming for many more people than it was. Kildani’s list secured 2/5 of the quota seats after mimicking the already established KDP tactic of fielding proxies to contest the Christian quota and instructing their Kurdish followers and cadres to vote for them. The KDP had won 2/5, leaving the independent and long-established Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM — Zowaa) with 1/5. At this time, Sako had even made overtures to all winning candidates despite the manner of their victories, inviting them to dinner and congratulating them in the hope of building a working relationship. Seeing the potential of this strategy and doing a simple cost/benefit calculation, Badr’s efforts to dominate the Christian quota went into overdrive in 2021.
Knowing what lay ahead, the leader of Zowaa, Yonadam Kanna, had withdrawn his candidacy for his seat in Baghdad in advance. Almost winning all 5 of the seats, an outcome scuppered only by the surprise win of a candidate supported by the Communist Party of Iraq-Kurdistan in Arbil, Kildani’s list now dominated Baghdad’s quota allocation for Christians (4/5). They could only achieve this with the help of tens of thousands of Muslim Arab votes from Iraq’s southern provinces.
These electoral tactics were an open secret since it was legal despite being morally bankrupt: current election law in Iraq means that anyone, including Muslim Kurds or Arabs, could cast their votes for candidates of Christian Assyrian background contesting the Christian quota seats, in the same way they could cast them for other minority group quota allocation. This effectively means that the Christian communities of Iraq have representatives elected by much the larger demographics of Muslims across the country. First as tragedy, then as farce.
Foreseeing the wholesale theft of the quota seats and the biggest challenge yet to his authority inside Iraq, Sako had called for Christians to boycott the election in 2021. This soured relations with Kildani and his circle beyond repair. Empowered by the inevitable electoral landslide, Kildani and his superiors began a campaign to erode Sako’s position as head of Christian affairs in the country. The influence wielded by his pro-Iran sponsors compelled President Rashid to intervene in the manner that he did in July, knowing Sako would leave Baghdad and clear the path for Kildani’s circle to accumulate more power.
What the KDP had been attempting for nearly two decades was achieved by Iran-affiliated groups in three years: to crush independent Assyrian political representation in order to subsume and portray Christians as fully supportive of an external political agenda. Historically, this was being successfully achieved by the KDP in incremental steps, as they cared much more about about the optics and had to curtail their appetite for abuse with Western observers in mind. Iran has no such concerns, and it was now Iran that had mobilised its resources in Iraq to conquer Nineveh.
With this veneer of legitimacy, Kildani’s sponsors expanded their influence in the liberated areas in the Nineveh Plain through militia deployment with a view to demographic change. After all, this was the real prize. These were the same objectives of the KDP, who were still embroiled in a tug-of-war with Baghdad over both Kirkuk and Nineveh’s disputed and resource-rich territories, but Kildani’s sponsors could wield significantly more power than the KDP to make their moves in Nineveh now, while their growing connections to the leader of the PUK, Bafel Talabani, could strengthen their hand elsewhere within Iraq.
THE NPU
Speaking in an interview in 2016, US KRG Representative and KDP member Bayan Rahman had lamented that “in much of the Middle East, it’s who’s got the gun that counts.” This reality was repeatedly demonstrated in KDP attempts to forcefully annex Nineveh’s Christian and Yazidi towns and villages to the Kurdistan Region through peshmerga militia occupation, minority disempowerment and provincial election rigging. During the fight against ISIS and after the liberation of these areas, the Nineveh Plain became populated by a patchwork of militias each with their own checkpoints and divergent chains of command, making life miserable for locals.
Out of this mire, local Assyrians belonging to the Chaldean and Syriac sects formed their own militia, the Nineveh Plain Protection Units (NPU). This force, recognised and trained by the US as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, undertook patrols and combat missions alongside US forces to liberate Assyrian-majority areas in Nineveh from ISIS. Unlike party political militias who were directly created by the KDP and pro-Iran forces to render their military presence in Nineveh as locally popular and legitimate, NPU commanders from formerly ISIS-controlled towns developed a partnership with Zowaa and answered to the Commander and Chief of Iraq’s Armed Forces: the Prime Minister of Iraq, and not Tehran or a Barzani.
Owing to these disparate chains-of-command, there was already great tension between the NPU and the Babylon Brigade in the Nineveh Plain. The tension was only increasing given that the NPU was locally derived and popular and often found members of Kildani’s brigade of outsiders engaging in criminal activity, from property and artifact theft, extortion, looting and harassment throughout their areas of operation. These were two forces with completely different relationships with the Christian community in the Nineveh Plain, and crucially, there was no nuance in Western policy circles to effectively treat them as such. With Babylon’s election victory and the removal of the NPU’s political sponsor, Zowaa, Kildani could now move to dissolve this rival force and replace it with his own backed by Iran.
In March this year, NPU members staged a protest against the Babylon Brigades in Bakhdida (Qaraqosh), Nineveh Plain for arbitrarily arresting some of its members and called for the reestablishment of the NPU as a force untangled from Babylon’s chain-of-command. These protests, albeit intermittent in frequency, are not covered by any media platforms with an eye on the bigger picture.
OTTOMAN REDUX
Meanwhile, the US were aware of all of these events as they were occurring through a combination of their own local officials, Iraqi partners and diaspora minority advocates. The US approach to Iraq during the Trump years could be referred to as an ‘active disengagement’, where operations after the liberation of Mosul were wound down and diplomats had increasingly less to do except tick boxes, look for success stories, and find ways to utilise their positions on foreign lands to boost Trump’s popularity among his domestic base.
As part of a realignment of attention and resources towards Russia and China, the directive to project leadership without presence in the Middle East became the impossible objective, as exemplified by the recent events in Israel. In Iraq and elsewhere, this took shape in the prioritisation of largely empty “religious freedom” initiatives through United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) sponsored events and report writing. Much of the “work” centred on giving individuals from authoritarian states a platform to share their experiences and petition the US Government for support while aggrandising the achievements of US partners such as the Kurdish-led autonomous governments in Iraq and Syria, even if the realities on the ground were far more complex and contradictory.
Amid these factors, Iraq’s descent into paralysis was a self-fulfilling policy.
The US and Iraq had explicitly given up on the prospect of democratic representation for minorities. There has never even been any rhetoric to the contrary. After a brief flirtation with the idea after the invasion, religious leaders in Iraq were de facto rendered chief representatives and spokespeople for the various Christian sects within the state, and this has proven to have worked for everyone except the Christian communities.
The US had recognisable figures such as the Chaldean Archbishop of Arbil, Bashar Warda, attending White House events with former Vice President Mike Pence, while Arab and Kurdish leaders in Iraq could call on popular, stable yet intra-communally unaccountable figureheads to transmit their agendas through for decades at a time. Without an electoral mandate, appointed leaders can be deposed and changed on a whim by those with power with no obligation to any democratic process. Sako’s appointment as Head of Christian Affairs — a role that bestows powers involving administration of funds and projects as well as a projection of national authority —was ultimately made by decree and removed by decree.
To compliment the previous regime’s most enduring global export, Arabisation (enter the rash-like, reductive nomenclature “Iraqi Christian” that reduces a pre-Christian, pre-Iraqi people into something agreeable to their successive rulers), this neo-millet system was successfully exported across the world resulting in Christians gradually having no voice outside of their Churches — or rather — louder than the bells of their own churches. What was praised as “freedom of religion” in government and NGO reports actually fostered conditions that elevated vulnerable religious leaders into unopposed, political leadership positions for already vulnerable communities. This eliminated rights to equity and state protection — not provided them. And this was also how minority religious communities were organised within the Ottoman Empire for centuries until they were massacred and deported.
Naturally, despite the prestige, recognition and invitations showered on these figures today, this dynamic puts essentially powerless religious leaders in the firing line as fully fledged political leaders on a national level. It places both minorities and their religious leaders within parallel hierarchies of weakness dislocated from mainstream society and afforded them no meaningful avenues to participate as equal members of it without provoking intense suspicion.
Yet, Sako has always maintained a very pro-Iraqi posture, even after Iraq’s endemic corruption, sectarian strife and institutional failures instigated the targeted violence and upheaval experienced by Christians across Iraq since 2003. Even when local Chaldean Catholic and Syriac Christians had formed the NPU, Sako and Warda were categorically against it along with the illegitimate “Christian” proxy militias stood up by Kurdish and Arab factions — tarring all forces with the same brush in principle. In interviews with the media, both declared that Christians should not join any militias and join the Iraqi Army or Peshmerga instead — even through both had consistently failed these communities and enacted no plan to incorporate local security forces in Nineveh within a coherent, national security framework. Internally however, Sako and the wider Chaldean Church embraced the NPU. During a mass service in Karamlesh, Nineveh Plain in July 2017, he declared: “our forefathers have irrigated this land by martyrdom. We must continue defending our rights and our historical homeland."
Creating a tension in his position, Sako threw his support behind the NPU when he was facing his community, but condemned the formation of all militias without exception through various media channels. From this posturing, there is a feeling that the rise of Kildani could only have been thwarted with the delegitimisation of all militias by a strong Iraqi state taking care of business, but this was impossible. Beyond a decrepit Iraq unable to control militias primarily serving the interests of foreign states, Sako had also overestimated the willingness of the US to intervene to keep Iran’s influence in check.
“INTRA-COMMUNAL RIVALRY”
Much of the present analyses highlights the phenomenon of ‘intra-communal’ rivalry in Iraq, and that the conflict between Kildani and Sako is something that is an example of this trend, or a microcosm of the rivalry between competing Kurdish/Kurdish factions (KDP vs PUK) and extended out to Kurdish/Arab factions (KDP vs Badr). This is not accurate and largely think-tank-speak in a regretfully still obscured Assyrian context. Sako’s own divisiveness when it comes to intra-Christian affairs within Iraq and the diaspora is little documented and even less understood. Once an advocate for unity across the Christian sects under the auspices of the Vatican gradually became an advocate for Chaldean Catholic particularity and privilege when the political stakes were raised.
Over the past decade, Sako has called for his parishioners to back exclusively sectarian Chaldean Catholic political parties propped up by the KDP to contest elections in Baghdad and Arbil and issued statements rejecting the hyphenated name (Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac), much to the dismay of many Assyrians across all sects not only in Iraq, but worldwide. This sectarian rhetoric was offered to his community while condemning sectarianism to other Iraqis. If there was real intra-communal rivalry among Christians in Iraq, Sako would need to have been competing with established segments of his own community, not the pawn of a foreign state in the form of Kildani.
With this move, Kildani is a step closer to achieving his own ambition to be the central figure of Christian affairs in Iraq, but he is not doing so through popular, bottom-up support from Christians; he is being positioned through top-down positioning exerted by his pro-Iran sponsors at the heart of Iraq’s government. The façade of intra-communal rivalry among Sako and Kildani is a superficial reading for the real phenomenon afoot; a dominant political and military faction in Iraq, the pro-Iran segments of the PMF, is targeting a vulnerable community and expanding its operations in a strategic region in Northern Iraq. This is in step with Iran’s activities in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere in the region (and wherever the guns are now being loaded and the rockets are being fired).
The importance of who is the recognised custodian of the Christian endowment has both administrative and symbolic consequences too. Events such as Warda’s visit to the White House in 2018 to celebrate House Resolution 390 confirming continued aid to Christians and Yazidis would have been rendered far more difficult to justify. This is because much of the aid money directly channelled through USAID was given to the Chaldean Church as a qualifying actor and recipient, in line with the language of the policy favouring established “faith-based” groups with local legitimacy. The new decree revoking Sako’s authority may impact the legality and mechanism of working directly with the Chaldean Church in Iraq for Western governments and NGOs. Or more bleakly, Iraq’s insertion of a hostile interlocking variable connecting Christians in Iraq to the outside world (Kildani) presents yet another avenue for corruption and theft.
More recently, the tragic wedding fire that claimed the lives of over 130 Assyrians in Bakhdida on the 26th September 2023 reportedly occurred at a venue owned by someone connected to Kildani, Samir Nabo, who has since fled to Arbil and was reportedly arrested. Using these political connections and protections, repeated calls to comply with health and safety measures by authorities in Nineveh were routinely ignored by Nabo. Mourning families and others began rioting after the investigation was seemingly closed and demanded a full and transparent investigation into the events leading up to the fire which Iraq had rushed to attribute to “unsafe fireworks”. The rioters burned Nabo’s properties in Bakhdida demanding justice. Sheeto, a Syriac Catholic priest from Bakhdida who lost ten relatives in the fire, had told The Associated Press that the fire was “intentional”, with Sako echoing the claim that it “was the act of someone who sold his conscience and nation for a specific agenda.” There remains no justice or relief for its survivors.
SUPREME JANITOR
Kildani now occupies a strong, formal position in Iraqi Christian affairs because of how Western states and Iraq neglected to maintain the integrity of the Christian quota system. When Christian Assyrians had an independent voice through it, it was mostly ignored internationally in favour of platforming more easily recognisable religious leaders from Iraq’s Christian sects. What international observers did not anticipate was how the quota seats demonstrated legitimacy and authority on a local level that went unappreciated to Western policymakers searching in vain for stability and unanimity through otherwise powerless sectarian actors (the leaders of various churches). A distant faith in neo-milletism as an organising principle has yielded only the slow death of those organised. The failure to buttress an independent and accountable voice has now brought about consequences across all spheres of Iraqi society: whether security, political and religious. These all impact the wider region, in line with the opening adage.
Kildani, like the Arab and Kurdish proxies who contest and occupy the Christian quota seats, and the religious leaders who are on Western speed-dial for political events and commentary, are not accountable to their constituents, but rather to their sponsors outside of the community. Christian Assyrians of all sects have repeatedly called for the legal protection of the quota seats from Kurdish and Arab interference and staged multiple protests to this effect, but these requests went ignored by both Baghdad and Arbil. The US had also shown no interest in mediating this situation towards the benefit of Assyrians and other minorities even if those benefits extended to both Iraq and the US, and instead recognised the Iraqi election results in 2018 and 2021 as legitimate, undermining efforts to build a truly representative democracy in Iraq. No matter the efforts of diaspora advocates, the US was fixated on a status quo that was not even serving its own interests.
To add salt to the wound, the US has consistently been willing to partner with actors belonging to friendly factions in Iraq even if they had secured positions through patronage, fraud and violence, as US officials did with the KDP-appointed mayor of Alqosh, Lara Yousif, who was strategically given her position in the contested territories by a KDP-stacked Nineveh Provincial Council. Now that it is Kildani reaping the rewards of political patronage, an individual belonging to a hostile faction instead of a friendly one, he is sanctioned instead of the same structures, methods and tactics that were used to create him.
Perversely, this means that the politics of the winning candidates in the Christian quota only began to be registered from a Western perspective when their affiliations to pro-Iran actors in Iraq were learned. Even so, what has this all meant for Assyrians? Absolutely nothing. All proxies have proven to be simply janitors watering plants and taking out the trash for their sponsors. They have no autonomy or will of their own.
The operating principle to identify and degrade threats rather than to build an environment where threats find it increasingly difficult to emerge, strengthen and expand is the summation of the US’ self-defeating policy in Iraq. In other words, many of the outcomes that the US had set out to produce in Iraq are defeated by the very means the US chose to achieve them. The degrading system that once supported a willing partner (KDP) to expand its influence, award oil contracts in disputed territories, and begin engineering its own demographic change has effectively given Iran a blueprint to do the same.
The acceptance of the October 2021 election results and the theft of 4/5 quota seats also took place later in the same year of the much-vaunted visit of the Pope to Iraq. An alleged new dawn in intercommunal relations quickly became a new nightmare months later. In response to the reportage of Sako’s treatment, the Iraqi Government published a quote from the Vatican’s Chargé d’Affaires in Baghdad claiming that “the Holy See does not have any observations or objections regarding the procedures of the Presidency of the Republic.” Embarrassingly for Iraq, the Vatican clarified its position in a statement on the same day, “further to some partial and misleading reporting on this issue […] the administration of the Church properties should continue to be exercised freely by the Heads of Churches also on a practical level.” Worryingly in September 2023, the Pope is photographed receiving Kildani during a public audience with his office seemingly doing no background checks against sanctioned individuals.
Meanwhile, Sako’s departure from Baghdad and his embrace in Arbil was broadcast by Chaldean Catholic and Kurdish media on July 22nd. Contrary to any reasonable imagining, it was not an event portraying a forlorn man leaving his home under political duress, but the celebration of a man’s formal political repositioning and a coup for the KDP, who staged a welcoming event complete with its own Christian proxies leading proceedings. Providing sanctuary and a base of operations for senior religious leaders has historically provided the KDP international clout and leverage when attempting to offset its own long list of human rights abuses targeting the minority communities themselves.
AN EMERGING AXIS
Where many Assyrian religious leaders have been welcomed by KDP leaders who have developed relationships with Western states and Turkey, the PUK in Iraq has traditionally been closer to Iran and the emerging pro-Iran axis inside Iraq. This relationship is increasingly based on a convergence of interests among Talabani and Kildani, who along with US sanctioned Qais al-Khazali and the wider pro-Iran network in Iraq, represent a counter-axis to the US, KDP and Turkey inside the country.
The theft of Christian quota seats by Kildani was undoubtedly celebrated by Talabani and the PUK, who primarily view it as a new lever to weaken its rival Kurdish party, the KDP, who were its more traditional thieves. When considering the greater geopolitical picture across the region, and how events in Israel have sparked a series of much smaller events in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, the fate of already shrunken and besieged minorities remain even more precarious than they normally are.
For Assyrians in Iraq in particular, long forced to depend on religious leaders to “make their case” to disinterested international audiences, the assaults on their position in the country come not only from non-state actors such as ISIS who made countless headlines, but the very state itself and the factions embedded within it. This is where the headlines go unwritten. These factions, both friendly and hostile to Western states and their interests, draft and execute its policies on a far more subtle level. They utilise the very mechanisms, bureaucratic and structural provisions created to safeguard minority communities against the communities themselves to further their own agendas.
While Sako remains popular among Iraqi observers and many members of the Chaldean Catholic community in Iraq and in diaspora, he represents one of the legacies of the US invasion of 2003 among the global Assyrian public. In practice, there is markedly far more to gain for individual Assyrians and their organisations and institutions in terms of freedom, status and privilege when pursuing a sectarian agenda incentivised by external groups than it is when pursuing a unified one built on intra-communal commonalities and a shared future from the ground up. Instead of developing the capacities of minority communities in a system built of equity and respect for all rights, the US helped create a system that placed the fate of these communities into the hands of its local clients regardless of the abuses committed. With an ever-diminishing US presence in Iraqi affairs and no prospect of correcting these structural mistakes, Assyrians in Nineveh have been forced to swap one form of humiliation for another.
Indigenous minority communities, disproportionately along with Arabs and Kurds outside entrenched patronage networks, are still emigrating away from all regions of Iraq despite the any now dilapidated discourse to the contrary. It seems that Sako has experienced the same fate as the independent Assyrian voices in Iraq’s parliament: those who had believed in Iraq the most were ultimately condemned and betrayed by it the most when the politics of its dominant groups change. This has been the case in the context of Christian religious leaders finding place and privilege throughout the Middle East during the last millennium. Now, of course, Sako is welcomed by the KRG. That is, of course, until he or his successor are no longer welcomed.
For the past two decades, Assyrians were always encouraged to believe in a vision of Iraq that no-one else believed in, or in US strength that only ever manifested to reinforce their plight. The other Iraq was never more than a promise and a whisper. What do Assyrians, Yazidis and other minorities do now after everyone has failed them and forced them into the shadows?
