ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq’s Assyrian and Chaldean Christians on Thursday reiterated their calls for a special voting status during the next federal and regional elections to prevent the minority vote from being “hijacked.”
Christians in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region have long requested special voting for the minority to prevent external, well-established parties from interfering in the minority quota, but their calls have largely gone unanswered and the community says their quota seats have been seized.
In a letter addressed to the Iraqi parliament and Baghdad’s top court, a coalition of Assyrian and Chaldean parties urged authorities to implement numerous changes or else risk ending “the historical existence of our component in Iraq.”
“Amending the Iraqi parliament’s election law and the provincial council elections to ensure true representation of the Christian component, by creating an electronic registry for voters from the Christian component in which registration is allowed for the component’s members only” was a key demand, a letter from the parties read.
Lawmakers from the minority quota in the Kurdish and Iraqi parliaments are often criticized for not being the true faces of the populations they represent but rather agents of ruling parties.
Winning minority candidates with external party affiliations often receive tens of thousands of votes from districts in which the community has very minimal to no presence in, as big parties often mobilize scores of loyalists to tip these candidates over the line in exchange for their loyalty in parliament.
The coalition said a potential resolution to the issue could be through “allocating an independent ballot paper and boxes specifically for the Christian component, through which voting is limited to the component’s members only to prevent external interference,” as well as through setting distinct electoral districts for areas populated by Christians.
Baghdad and Erbil’s failure to address the community’s voting status has also led many influential and popular minority parties to boycott successive elections. A former Kurdistan lawmaker from the Assyrian Democratic Movement (Zowaa) last year told Rudaw English that it is “impossible” for independent parties to secure a seat under the current election law.
The coalition also called on Baghdad to “withdraw armed militias from the villages and our people in the Nineveh Plains, and handing the security file to the Christian and Yazidi components, the original inhabitants of the Nineveh Plains.”
They said that such a move would “ensure the protection of our regions from exploitation of the uncontrollable militias and their blatant interference in our people’s internal affairs.”
The call was seemingly directed against Rayan al-Kaldani, leader of the Christian Babylon Movement, a party and armed group affiliated with the pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi).
The Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq is an area with a historic Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac presence where Christian towns and villages lie. The region’s historic Christian inhabitants were driven out when the Islamic State (ISIS) attacked the area in 2014. Efforts to return since the group was ousted have largely floundered due to the presence of the Babylon Brigades in the area.
The Babylon Brigades, the paramilitary wing of the Babylon Movement, “is presented as a local Christian force but has been recruited largely from Shia Muslim communities in Baghdad’s Sadr City, al-Muthanna, and Dhi Qar,” and its objective is domination of the Nineveh Plains, a March 2023 profile of the brigade by the Washington Institute concluded.
The brigades have been accused of illegally seizing historic Christian land in Nineveh province after ISIS was driven out of the area. Human rights abuses committed by the group ultimately led to the United States Treasury sanctioning Kildani in 2019 for the abuses as well as corruption.
Iraq’s Christian community has been devastated in the past two decades. Following the US-led invasion in 2003, sectarian warfare prompted followers of Iraq’s multiple Christian denominations to flee, and attacks by ISIS in 2014 hit minority communities especially hard.
“We demand that these procedures be applied in the Kurdistan Region’s elections as well,” the coalition said, calling on the Region’s government, presidency, and parliament to amend the Region’s electoral law.
The Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac Christian community has five designated seats in the Iraqi legislature and three in the Kurdistan Region.
