Music is a valuable form of oral history composition and formation for ethnic minorities in the Middle East whose language, cultural rights and ethnic identity might be suppressed by the state in which they reside. Music and singing become major media for resisting the status quo and disseminate their ideology, cultural identity, and history from their perspective. This is especially significant when lingocide practices are at play. Thus, when people are not allowed to learn their language at a school setting, or standardize it appropriately a smaller percentage of a “reading public” emerges as opposed to the “listening public” (see Blum & Hassanpour, 1996). Since the listening public does not need advanced reading and writing skills in their native tongue to be able to compose, or listen to music, music becomes the medium where the culture is revived and the community’s identity strengthened. For the Assyrians, the significance of popular music and musicians became especially instrumental to their national cause during the late 19th and early 20th century. Through this medium, they realized, certain causes could be highlighted and communicated to the public in an effective manner. More importantly, music could be used to challenge the ‘official’ history of the state and replace it with their version or the ‘other’ history. As a result, numerous Assyrian Iraqi singers were tortured and imprisoned for singing patriotic songs in the 1960s and 1970s. With the increased persecution singers faced in Iraq, the attention shifted to the Diasporas, where most notable Assyrian singers escaped, too. Thus, songs of defiance continued to disseminate among the Assyrian population in Iraq secretly. In the early 1980s, cassette tapes of Ashour Bet-Sargis’ and Ivan Aggasi’s patriotic Assyrian songs were copied from household to household behind closed doors. Assyrians enjoyed the affirmation of their identity and the motifs of survival and triumph these songs provided. In this paper, I will examine some typical Assyrian songs through historical contextualization and thematic analysis and provide an account of the emergence of popular music in the Assyrian communities in the Middle East. Due to time and thematic constraints, the emphasis will be on the Assyrian community in Iraq during the Ba’ath rule (1968-2003).