The Assyrians are a transnational ethnic-group indigenous to a contiguous geographical area spanning adjacent parts of northern Iraq, north-western Iran, south-eastern Turkey, and north-eastern Syria (effectively Assyria and northern Mesopotamia).
With the majority of those who identify as Assyrians coming from Christian and non-Christian backgrounds, and adhering to a number of denominations, the community is linguistically dichotomized as “western” and “eastern” Syriacs. The Assyrians trace their roots to the ancient people of the same name and form a distinctive community, united through ethnicity, a culture that constitutes one of the oldest continuous traditions in the world, and language (Assyrian, also more commonly known as Syriac or Neo-Aramaic).
According to political experts, the Assyrians have been deemed a ‘stateless-nation,’ i.e., a people without a state. They have also been regarded as an ‘ethnonationalist movement’ or ‘proto-nation’, i.e., a nation seeking to establish their own sovereign state in the Middle East.