The Kurdistan Regional Government’s recent arrest and detainment of a journalist for his discovery of an ancient Assyrian stone relief illustrates deeper issues with how both Assyrian material heritage and the Assyrian people are being treated in Iraq (R.S. Zaya, 'What Ancient Stones Still Mean to the Assyrian People Today' Hyperallergic, November 1, 2019).
Hurmuz Mushi, an Assyrian activist and journalist, stumbled upon an artifact while he happened to be digging for a water pipe in the region of Fayda in northern Iraq. It was an Assyrian relief showing a figure seated on a throne flanked by three humans and three animals. His discovery would have brought nothing but joy to an archaeologist or museum curator. In a video posted online on the same day, Mr. Mushi made a sensible request that the Iraqi or Kurdish governments take the necessary steps to preserve the newly discovered antiquity [...] The response from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), however, was anything but sensible: On June 17th, Kurdish security forces, the Asayish, threatened his life and detained the journalist for three days until he was released on conditional bail for roughly $6000, an enormous sum in Iraq.[...] the very presence of anything Assyrian serves as a direct challenge to Kurdish claims of legitimacy over lands that have been subject to a decade-long program of Kurdification, annexation, and land-grabs, aided and abetted by the apathy of the central government in Baghdad and the chaotic interregnums after the Iraq War and the fall of ISIS.Assyrians are the last Aramaic-speaking ethnic group in the world. The distinct, indigenous community — whose members belong to various ancient Christian sects — numbered nearly 1.5 million prior to the Iraq War but has fallen precipitously to under 150,000 today. The KRG’s repressive and anti-historical policy toward Assyrian heritage is itself part of broader trends
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