Who are the Assyrians and what is the Nineveh Plain history with David Lazar

The region in north-western Iraq, the Nineveh Plains, has for thousands of years been the home of the Assyrians, the original Iraqis. The Assyrians (who are Christian), as well as other peoples like the Yezidis (who are polytheistic), have for generations endured persecution at the hands of Muslim like the Kurdish Badr Khan in the 19th century, Saddam Hussein in the 20th century, and presently, the so-called Islamic State or ISIS.

In all of these instances, little help or protection has come from external powers, and the Assyrians, Yezidis and others of the Nineveh Plain have had to fend for themselves. In fact, when ISIS extremists invaded Northern Iraq in the summer of 2014,  the Iraqi military and the Kurdish Peshmerga fled, leaving the Assyrians and Yezidis with no choice but to flee for their lives, a mass exodus of tens of thousands of people.