Coloniality is predominantly linked with or defined in relation to Europe in the Middle East; specifically, the nineteenth century European military advances into areas ruled by Mughal, Ottoman and Qajar empires. Like many postcolonial states in western Asia, the story of Iraq as a nation-state begins with the British mandate and the drawing of borders which divided Assyrian territory between the newly constructed modern states of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. In the case of Iraq, the arbitrary carving of this territory rendered the Assyrians a minority within an Arab majority state with a sizable Kurdish “minority.” The globalization of the Westphalian state system ushered in a new world where states were territorial enclosures of one nation. Consequently, the history of Iraq (pre-2003) is one of Arab nationalism with a Kurdish “problem,” both of which manifested in the erasure and appropriation of Assyrian heritage and land. In post-2003 Iraq, we see continuities of this pattern, even under the auspices of “democratic nation-building.” Locating the dispossession of Assyrians within modern state-making practices which have resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples globally in the construction of homogenous states, this paper is concerned with the interplay between nationalist narratives and the legal-political possibilities imagined from such narratives in modern Iraq. Specifically, this paper shows the continuities in the dispossession and erasure of Assyrians whereby Arabs claim Mesopotamian history as Iraqi and Kurds in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) claim Mesopotamian history as Kurdish in their attempts to build an Iraqi/Kurdish state(s). I use the 2005 Iraqi Constitution and the Kurdish Constitution Writing Committee as mechanisms with which Assyrians are denied recognition as Indigenous and as a nation, which in turn, denies them their rights to self-determination and self-governance. I argue post-2003 Iraq’s power-sharing model, which insists on “equality” between ethnic groups to build the state has, in reality, produced disastrous economic, political, and cultural consequences for Assyrians that are akin to nation-destroying.