AUA Americas Letter to US Secretary of State, Rex W. Tillerson

Mr. Rex W. Tillerson
Secretary of State
United States of America

Dear Secretary Tillerson,

On behalf of the Assyrian Universal Alliance and its affiliate organizations worldwide, I extend our heartfelt congratulations to you for becoming the 69th Secretary of State of the United States of America.

You are assuming this responsibility at a time that the Assyrian people also known as Chaldean Syriac, who are indigenous to the Middle East, are in danger of losing their ancestral lands and facing forced displacement and mass migration. The Assyrian people have been the bedrock of civilization for over 7000 years and remnant of once a great empire centered in Nineveh, the city to which God dispatched Jonah during Old Testament times. Assyrians have faced constant persecution for the past 1500 years in the region, having barely survived the genocides inflicted upon them by the Ottoman Empire during WWI.

Today our displaced people and our security forces, that played a role in the liberation of the Nineveh Plain in Iraq, are prevented from returning to their homes by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) forces. This is an attempt to completely uproot the Assyrians from their ancestral lands as part of a land and natural resources confiscation effort that will affect the demographics of the Nineveh Plain. Deracinating Assyrians is part of a general plan intended to eradicate Christians and other ethnoreligious minorities from the Middle East.

We are grateful to President Trump and the United States government for recognizing the targeting of the Christians by ISIS as an act of genocide. However, we need more concrete actions from the Iraqi government, the United States and its allies to ensure that the Assyrian people remain a viable segment of the fabric of the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Syria. Therefore, we request that the following steps be taken through your office by the United States of America in coordination with the Iraqi government

  1. Equip and train the Assyrians in Northern Iraq to be able to defend themselves and their existence. After the events leading to the fall of Mosul and its effects on Assyrians, our people no longer trust anyone else in the region to provide for their security.
  2. Support the recent Iraqi government resolution to recognize the Nineveh Plain as a disaster zone. For the sake of the defenseless indigenous ethnic and religious minorities, the Nineveh Plain should not be turned into a battleground for a proxy war between the regional powers and the Kurdish struggle for independence.
  3. Encourage the Iraqi government to approve the creation of the Nineveh Plain province and fund rebuilding it so that the displaced Assyrian people may return to their homes and live free on their ancestral lands.

We are grateful to you in advance for your support and would be more than happy to present our case in person.

Respectfully,
Carlo K. Ganjeh
Chapter Secretariat
Assyrian Universal Alliance – Americas Chapter