This paper is concerned with the erasure of Assyrian history and identity in Iraq. Historical context is vital to the study of the contemporary politics of any state. The common story of the Iraqi state has been most frequently told chronologically through periods. This well-rehearsed story takes the student of Iraqi politics through the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the formation of the state in 1932, the British colonial period, independence in 1933, the periods of violence and political instability through to the revolution of 1958, the Ba’ath period, the 2003 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. Specifically, this history revisionism has resulted in the erasure of the Assyrian identity, reducing them to a religious minority. There is a great deal of scholarship concerned with 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 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 genealogical method of narrative analysis, the aim of this paper is to first, disrupt common narratives of the Iraqi state and second, to re-tell this story by re-inserting the Assyrians, Iraq’s indigenous minority into the fabric of Iraqi politics. 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.