Ultimately, by highlighting the history of the Assyrians in twentieth-century Iraq, this work hopes to create a model that can be used for analyses of minorities across the region, where violence to marginalised communities is aleviated by their inclusion in mainstream history. This creation, if successful, was accomplished by demonstrating the importance of minorities to generally accepted ‘major’ events, which in turn was achieved through the application of (and in turn substantiated by) an inclusive paradigm where all experiences are vital to and exist in symbiosis with all others in order to illuminate a reality (or past) which is both holistic and intrinsically boundless and unknowable in its entirety (panenhistoricism). This essential interdependence thereby safeguards those experiences on the margins (i.e. the Assyrians and others) against subsumption (subordinating narrativisation) by the mainstream (‘Iraqi history’) through policies of acculturation tied to the destruction of place and ways of life, the building blocks of identity and community.

This work simultaneously serves as an alternative narrative about Iraq in the twentieth century as well as an Assyrian history of the region. It has looked outside the prism of the state and attempted to use the Assyrian situation to present another view of the historical events – a retelling of how and why they occurred, and why such issues, from a minority perspective, are essential to a panenhistorical reality or paradigm. It is a duty of scholarship to examine the story left untold. Unfortunately many still appear to adhere to the sometimessubconscious view that ‘at best, history is a story of power, a history of those who won’.