Something is happening in northern Iraq that barely registers outside the region -- yet for Assyrians, it is an existential threat. In the village of Bakhetme, more than 1,500 dunams of land have been confiscated and are being transferred to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and public employees. For the villagers, this is not paperwork or bureaucracy. It is their homes and their future.

All this comes as Iraq debates something historic: the implementation of Article 125 of the constitution -- self-administration for Assyrians, on their land, in their homeland.

Related: Kurdish Confiscation of Assyrian Lands in North Iraq

The land now being allocated is the same land Assyrians were stripped of by Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s, when the village was emptied and converted into a military zone. After 1991, the villagers returned, rebuilt their homes and farms, and reclaimed their land through work, not force. Today -- three decades later -- they are losing that same land again, not to bulldozers, but to administrative decrees.

This is neither isolated nor accidental. It follows a clear pattern:

• Their representation in Iraq's parliament is hijacked
• Their cemeteries are vandalized -- as in Shaqlawa, where crosses and nameplates were smashed
• Their houses are demolished in historic Assyrian towns like Bartella
• In Bakhetme we see the final step: the land itself is taken

Iraq's leaders often speak of democracy and minority rights. But lofty phrases collapse when the people they are meant to protect are losing their homes with a signature on a document. A community that cannot keep its land cannot keep anything -- not its holy places, not its schools, not its name.

It is also revealing to see what the world chooses to be outraged about. In other parts of the Middle East, opinion pages and UN halls fill with protests against settlement policies and demographic engineering. But when the same mechanisms target Assyrians -- confiscated fields, reassigned property, quiet administrative steps that slowly replace one population with another -- the silence is almost total. No one uses words like occupation or colonization, even though the outcome for those living there is the same.

In practice, a Kurdification of Mesopotamia is underway. As a Kurdish state-in-waiting expands on Assyrian ancestral land, the Assyrian space contracts. Assyrian and Kurdish struggles for self-determination should be able to move forward side by side -- two stateless peoples with equal rights to self-rule -- but reality shows a different logic. One people is building a state; the other is losing its home.

The villagers of Bakhetme are demanding three basic things:

• An immediate halt to land confiscation
• The return of their property
• A justice system that finally delivers the protection it promises

These are demands that should be self-evident. Yet in a country where minorities lack militias, lack political leverage, and lack protection, even the simplest rights become a fight for survival.

Bakhetme is not a local dispute. It is a warning sign. A people who survived genocides, massacres and terrorism are now being pushed out through paperwork and policy, by forces today dominated by Kurdish actors. The irony is almost unbearable.

Kurdish leaders speak of creating a "Christian administrative unit." But carving out a Christian enclave only to fold it into KRG control is something Assyrians will never accept. Assyrians demand self-administration in northwest Iraq -- in line with Article 125 and Iraq's own federal system.

Because if self-rule does not include protected land and genuine authority, then it is not self-rule -- it is a façade.

Michael Merdoyo is An Assyrian living in Exile, member of the Swedish Medborgerlig Samling (Citizens' Coalition).