Not only war but also a U.S. prioritization of the Kurdistan Regional Government's stability over decades has accelerated the displacement of Assyrians. Churches remain open, Assyrians celebrate holidays publicly, and Kurdish officials highlight Assyrian neighborhoods as evidence of coexistence. Yet despite this visibility, Assyrian communities continue to shrink. The reason is clear: Kurdish confiscation of their land.

Assyrians are an indigenous people with both urban populations and village-based communities. Their social, economic, and cultural continuity has historically depended on secure access to property, villages, and communal institutions. When land security collapses, demographic collapse follows, as it has over the past three decades across much of northern Iraq. U.S. and international policy shaping the region's post-conflict order has catalyzed the collapse.

Since the early 1990s, U.S. policymakers treated the Kurdish-administered region of Iraq as a security partner and buffer against regional threats. Stability, counterterrorism cooperation, and humanitarian access became the dominant metrics of success. In this framework, they took superficial coexistence--open churches, functioning neighborhoods, and the absence of mass violence--as evidence of a durable political settlement, but they paid far less attention to land governance and whether displaced communities retained equal standing within the systems governing their property. This emphasis created a structural blind spot. Property rights, courts, administrative authority, and security enforcement matter more for long-term stability than symbolic tolerance. Yet in many Kurdish-controlled areas and adjacent disputed territories, land registries, courts, and security forces operate within overlapping spheres of political authority. Communities without governing power may see disputes adjudicated but rarely resolved in practice.

Many land disputes involving Assyrians stem from conflict-driven displacement. Non-Assyrians settled Assyrian villages abandoned during fighting in the 1960s, 1970s, and later. They disregarded documentation, blurred boundaries, and normalized competing claims. This displacement removed Assyrians from strategic rural areas, enabling Kurdish political authority to consolidate historically Assyrian territory. After 1991, and especially after 2003, Kurdish institutions formalized authority over Assyrian lands. Over time, unresolved claims became accepted administrative realities.

These dynamics are not limited to rural districts. Kurdish authorities often showcase Ankawa, a town adjacent to Erbil, and the most visible Assyrian settlement in northern Iraq, to international delegations. Yet even here, Assyrians report pressures related to property access, zoning decisions, rising costs, and administrative dependence on political authorities beyond their control. Visibility has not translated into autonomy over land.

Assyrian organizations have documented these patterns for years, and they appear in international human rights reporting. Complaints repeatedly cite the same obstacles: cases that remain pending for years, rulings that go unenforced, and pressure on communities to abandon claims rather than pursue protracted legal battles. The outcome is predictable--families leave, villages empty, and Kurds absorb contested land by default. Security arrangements reinforce these dynamics. Kurdish forces maintain checkpoints and exercise authority across many mixed or historically Assyrian areas. While justified on security grounds, these deployments also confer control over movement, administration, and dispute management. Displaced communities are left petitioning the same institutions that coerce them on the ground.

For decades, U.S. policy has failed to address this issue. Aid, reconstruction funding, and political support flowed through regional institutions with minimal conditionality tied to land adjudication or enforcement. Because forced displacement drives the decline of the Assyrian population, restoring stability requires restitution and equal access to land adjudication, enforcement, and self-governance. Equality must not be symbolic; it is the minimum condition for survival.

A system that allows indigenous communities to worship freely but cannot guarantee their land rights is unsustainable. Coexistence cannot be preserved through symbolism alone. Without credible legal mechanisms and equal standing within governing institutions, stability becomes performative rather than durable. This imbalance is embedded in Iraq's constitutional framework, which grants federalism to Kurds while relegating Assyrians to subordinate status and treating them as subjects throughout Iraq.

Communities do not disappear only through violence; they disappear when they lose self-determination. In northern Iraq, the fate of the Assyrians remains the clearest measure of whether U.S.-backed stability has brought justice or merely managed decline. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio talk about protecting besieged Christians worldwide; they should not make northern Iraq an exception.