No less than five Assyrian militias have been founded in the last two years in South Kurdistan (Iraq) and West Kurdistan (Syria) with the aim of protecting this mostly Christian people from attacks by Islamist extremism and, more specifically, from the advance of the Islamic State (IS). Assyrians, who speak different languages belonging to the Aramaic group, are in the hundreds of thousands in Kurdistan, and have been battling for decades against forced assimilation -especially by Arab nationalism- and for autonomy.

The foundation of the latest Assyrian militia was announced earlier this week in Tel Isqof (north of Mosul, South Kurdistan): the Nineveh Plain Forces (NPF), a group linked to the Bet-Nahrain Democratic Party -one of several Assyrian political parties.

In the regional context, it is not strange that the militia has links to a political force: all other armed groups maintain ties with other parties. This is the case for the Alqosh-based Nineveh Plains Protection Units (NPU), which is linked to the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM), a party representend in the South Kurdish Parliament.

Thw two militias maintain different approaches as regards the Massoud Barzani-led South Kurdish government. The NFP has decided to immediately go under the command of South Kurdistan's armed forces, the Peshmerga. Conversely, the NPU prefers to keep its own profile and is suspicious of the Barzani government. On the one side, the NPU recalls that the Peshmerga hastily abandoned Assyrian-majority towns in August 2014 as the IS fighters were advancing. On the other, the militia is more inclined to agree with Baghdad.

Another Assyrian militia collaborating with the Peshmerga is Dwekh Nawsha, founded in 2014 by the Assyrian Patriotic Party (APP) and based in Sharafya, a few kilometres south of Alqosh. Dwekh Nawsha militiamen entered last November neighboring Assyrian town Baqofa when the Peshmerga expelled IS jihadists from there.

All these towns are found in the Nineveh Plains, a region of some 4,000 square kilometres in the north and east of Mosul, on the eastern bank of the Tigris River. For Assyrians, this is the birthplace of their people: ruins of ancient Assyrian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud, Christian monasteries and a handful of Assyrian-majority towns are all located there. The Assyrians are not the only inhabitants of the plains: there are also Kurds -both Muslims and Yazidis-, Turkmens and Shabaks.

With more or less intensity, all Assyrian parties and militias demand the creation of an autonomous region in the Nineveh Plains as an Assyrian national homeland. Two major approaches exist: the first one sees that region under Kurdish protection, while the second prefers a separate Assyrian self-governing territory within a federal Iraq.

West Kurdistan's Assyrian militia allied to YPG-YPJ

One of the groups that has welcomed the creation of the NPF is the Syriac Military Council (MFS, Neo-Aramaic acronym), West Kurdistan's Assyrian militia. The MFS was yesterday marking two years since it itself was founded. In this period, and along YPG-YPJ Kurdish forces, the Assyrian group has been protecting Cizîrê -the easternmost and largest of the three self-governing West Kurdish cantons- from IS attacks. Cizîrê -which Assyrians refer to as Gozarto- reserves one of the positions of cantonal deputy presidents to Assyrians, and has given official status to their language, alongside Kurdish and Arabic.

The alliance between the YPG-YPJ and the MFS has also led the Assyrian militia to participate in the liberation of the Yazidi region of Sinjar, in South Kurdistan. In August 2014, the Islamic State conducted an offensive against Sinjar and laid siege to the mountain of the same name, where thousands of Yazidis took refuge. In December, a joint offensive by Peshmerga, Yazidi militias and YPG-YPJ allowed to break the siege. Kurdish forces and IS fighters are now battling for control over the town of Sinjar.

The MFS argues its involvement in the operation that "all people that live in the region have the right to defend themselves against extremism."

Also in West Kurdistan another Assyrian militia exists, the Sootoro (not to be confused with the MFS-linked Sutoro police). The Sootoro was created in 2013 and holds an alliance with Bashar al-Assad's Syrian army, which maintains troops in Cizîrê capital city Qamislo. The militia says its existence reflects the need to defend the Assyrian neighborhoods of the city, where the YPG-YPJ and the MFS operate too.

(Top image: an MFS military academy / picture by MFS.)