This paper is concerned with providing a counter-narrative of the history of the Iraqi state. Historical context is vital to the study of the contemporary politics of any state. The common story of Iraq has been most frequently told chronologically through periods marked by major events. This well-rehearsed story emphasizes moments in time upheld as the critical junctures of Iraqi history, from 1950 to the 2003 American-led invasion and subsequent regime change. These narratives are problematic because they not only perpetuate the myths of Iraq as a homogenous nation but also offer a limited understanding of Iraqi society. There is a great deal of scholarship concerned with explaining the processes of nation-building and democratization in post-2003 Iraq. A critical engagement with contemporary Iraqi politics requires a break and a deconstruction of these metanarratives in order to compose a more inclusive re-telling of Iraqi history, which lays a stronger foundation for ‘democratization from below’. Historically, Iraq’s nation-building project, as all nation-building projects, has attempted to construct a homogenous national identity through the exclusion of segments of society considered not to belong. One such mechanism is enacting policies aimed at re-writing the history of the Iraqi state to construct an exclusively Arab or Kurdish national identity. This historical revisionism has resulted in the marginalization of various religious, linguistic, cultural and ethnic minorities. To narrow the scope of the paper, I use the case of the Assyrian identity to argue that oftentimes, those on the margins or the periphery allow for a more accurate depiction of the politics on the ground. Using a mixture of newspapers, archives, and oral interviews, the paper aims to disrupt the common narratives of the Iraqi state using a genealogical method of narrative analysis through process tracking. A genealogical method is appropriate for this research because a fuller understanding of democratization in post-2003 Iraq requires a more complete and contextualized picture of Iraq’s history and its peoples.