Chaldean Syriac Assyrian Popular Council


The Chaldean Syriac Assyrian Popular Council, popularly known as Motwa, is a political party in Iraq that aims to represent the Assyrian people. The party in its current state was founded in 2007, on the initiative of Sarkis Aghajan, an ethnic Assyrian who was a high-ranking member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. As a party that represents minority communities, CSAPC participated in several elections, both on national, regional and local levels, mainly in various coalitions with other minority parties. The current president of the party is Jameel Zaito.
Attempting to overcome internal divisions among those communities, the party was founded under a complex name, that refers to Chaldeans, Syriacs and Assyrians. One of the main goals of CSAPC is to achieve administrative self-government or outright autonomy for the Nineveh Plains, a northern Iraqi region with high concentration of Christian population. The party claims the majority of the population in the Nineveh Plains suffers neglect and lack of service because they belong to minority groups, whose rights are not fully observed.
The Party runs Ishtar TV and publishes several different monthly magazines.
The party is closely affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and is mostly funded by Nechirvan Barzani.
On July 22, 2023 the party joined the Athra Alliance, a political alliance representing Assyrian–Chaldean–Syriac interests in Iraq.

Results

In the [2009 Iraqi governorate elections|January Iraqi governorate Elections in Iraq|elections of 2009], the party was part of a coalition that won the Assyrian reserved seats in Baghdad and Ninawa. It officially backed the Chaldean Democratic Union for the Basra seat, which the CDU won.
On July 25, 2009, the party ran for the first time on its own for the 111-member Kurdistan National Assembly. It received over 10,000 votes and won 3 of the 5 reserved Christian seats.
On March 7, 2010, Iraq held its parliamentary elections, where the party won 2 of the 5 reserved seats. The coalition maintained their seats during the 2014 parliamentary elections.
However, in recent years, the council has lost all elections that it has participated, due to the rise of pro-Iranian affiliated Babylon Movement, and the decline of Nechrivan Barzani's power within the KDP, leading to the rise of Ano Abdoka's Hammurabi Coalition.

Military wing

The Nineveh Plain Guard Forces is composed of former members of the Church Guards that was forced to disband and disarm in 2014 as Kurdish officials began confiscating weapons that belonged to local Assyrians prior to the ISIS invasion that left the Assyrians defenceless.
It's estimated that they currently have 1,500 Assyrian soldiers under Peshmerga command