November 22, 2025

Türkiye’s renewed activism in Iraq is reshaping regional calculations. Recent reports suggest that Ankara is attempting to transform Iraq from a long-standing security threat into the linchpin of its regional strategy, leveraging infrastructure, trade corridors, military presence, and energy integration to counter Iranian influence and reassert a historic role in Mesopotamia. With Iran and Syria’s reach weakening, Türkiye sees a rare opening to deepen its footprint in a region where it once ruled for centuries.

This shifting landscape reverberated at the Middle East Peace and Security (MEPS) 2025 forum in Duhok, where Kurdistan Region Interior Minister Rebar Ahmed traced today’s instability to century-old injustices. He argued that the modern map of the Middle East—carved by Sykes-Picot and modeled on European nation-states—never reflected the region’s ethnic or cultural mosaic. These artificial borders, he said, created exclusionary states whose authoritarian tendencies were built into their very foundations.

Ahmed highlighted the Kurdish question as a core unresolved issue. The Kurds, denied self-determination and subjected to systematic persecution throughout the twentieth century, have yet to receive meaningful recognition or apology from Baghdad. Without accountability, he argued, reconciliation remains impossible.

But Ahmed’s analysis left out another nation whose fate has been similarly shaped—and scarred—by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire: the Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs). As one of the region’s most ancient indigenous peoples, the Assyrians were likewise excluded from post-Ottoman negotiations. Their communities were divided across multiple new states, denied political representation, and subjected to waves of violence, demographic engineering, forced displacement, Arabization, and in some cases Kurdification.

The Assyrian experience mirrors the very structural injustices Ahmed described: the erasure of a people’s political voice, the undermining of their cultural rights, and their reduction to a vulnerable minority living at the mercy of stronger actors. Today, Assyrians remain without meaningful autonomy or security guarantees, and their population continues to decline as persecution, insecurity, and loss of land force them out of their historical homeland. Any discussion of the region’s future that fails to acknowledge the Assyrian question leaves out a fundamental component of Iraq’s social fabric.

Ahmed warned that despite changes in leadership after 2003, the mentality of governance in Iraq and Syria has largely persisted—one in which the dominance of a single group overrides the rights of all others. The Kurdistan Region, he claimed, has chosen a model of coexistence, though many observers note that the practical realities remain more complex, with minority communities—including Assyrians—still facing systemic challenges.

What remains clear is that Iraq and Syria stand at a decisive moment. Durable peace, Ahmed argued, requires confronting the unresolved national questions of Kurds, Assyrians, and other communities whose rights have been sidelined for generations. Justice, accountability, and inclusivity must form the foundation of any future political order.

In this context, Türkiye’s growing influence raises pressing questions. Is Ankara’s new strategy in Iraq merely geopolitical recalibration—or does it signal a deeper attempt to reassert a modernized form of Ottoman guardianship over the region’s fragmented peoples and borders? And if so, could Türkiye’s ambitions reshape the very Sykes-Picot legacy that Ahmed so deeply criticizes?

Whether this emerging Turkish-Iraqi partnership brings greater stability or simply inaugurates a new era of external domination remains to be seen. But for Assyrians, Kurds, and all the peoples of Iraq, justice—not geopolitics—will be the true measure of peace.