The ancient city of Nineveh stood where the eastern outskirts of Mosul are today, on the bank of the Tigris river.
[4] The Nineveh Plains are not only the historical homeland of the Assyrian people and a crucible of pre-Arab, pre-Kurdish, pre-Islam Mesopotamian civilisation, and it is a region where a majority of the population is currently drawn from the minorities.
[5] A 2019 testimony from Assyrian activist Reine Hanna at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom claimed that the rate of Assyrian return in towns guarded by the Nineveh Plain Protection Units was significantly higher than those controlled by other forces following the end of the Islamic State's occupation of the Nineveh Plain.
[8] Following the concerted attacks on Assyrians in Iraq, especially highlighted by the Sunday, August 1, 2004 simultaneous bombing of six Churches (Baghdad and Mosul) and subsequent bombing of nearly thirty other churches throughout the country, Assyrian leadership, internally and externally, began to regard the Nineveh Plain as the location where security for Christians may be possible.
This place of refuge remains underfunded and gravely lacking in infrastructure to aid the ever-increasing internally displaced people population.
[12] The Assyrian inhabited towns and villages on the Nineveh Plain form a concentration of those belonging to Syriac Christian traditions, and since this area is the ancient home of the Assyrian empire through which the people trace their cultural heritage, the Nineveh Plain is the area on which an effort to form and has become concentrated.
"[15][16] Since the towns and villages on the Nineveh Plain form a concentration of those belonging to Syriac Christian traditions, and since this area is the ancient home of the Assyrian empire through which these people trace their cultural heritage, the Nineveh Plain is the area on which the effort to form an autonomous Assyrian entity have become concentrated.
[20] The conference was organised by the European People's Party and had participants extending from Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac organizations, including representatives from the Federal Iraqi Government and Kurdistan Region.
Farmers followed old non-technological methods in their farming for several centuries, and their livelihood was always threatened due to nature's betrayal in situations of drought or plant epidemics such as grasshoppers.
Modern agricultural machinery such as tractors, harvester-threshers (reapers), along with new methods of treating and curing plant epidemics now exist.