invited to join the steering committee that was charged with defining Iraq's future. The ethnic make-up of the Iraq Interim Governing Council briefly (September 2003 – June 2004) guiding Iraq after the invasion included a single Assyrian Christian, Younadem Kana, a leader of the Assyrian Democratic Movement and an opponent of Saddam Hussein since 1979. Assyrians in post-Saddam Iraq have faced a high rate of persecution by fundamentalist Islamists since the beginning of the Iraq War. By early August 2004 this persecution included church bombings, and fundamentalist groups' enforcement of Muslim codes of behavior upon Christians, e.g., banning alcohol, forcing women to wear hijab. The violence against the community has led to the exodus of perhaps as much as half of the community. While Assyrians made up only just over 5% of the total Iraqi population before the war, according to the United Nations, Assyrians are over-represented among the Iraqi refugees (as much as 13%) who are stranded in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. A large number of Assyrians have found refuge in ancient Assyrian Christian villages in Nineveh Plains and Kurdistan Region. This led some Assyrians and Iraqi and foreign politicians to call for an Assyrian Christian autonomous region in those areas. In 2008 the Assyrians formed their own militia, the Qaraqosh Protection Committee to protect Assyrian towns, villages and regions in the north. In 2008 the Assyrian Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Mosul was assassinated by some Kurds while some have claimed assassins were hired by local Arab tribes. Rahho was a defender of Assyrian self-administration. Some observers have claimed that Kurdish KDP forces often used to practice their shooting on important Assyrian cultural heritage sites. Kurdish KDP security forces have been criticized for human rights abuses, abuses "ranged from threats and intimidation to detention in undisclosed locations without due process." In 2015, the local KDP security forces arrested and detained political activist Kamal Said Kadir, for having written articles on the Internet critical of the KDP. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Some activists have claimed that membership in Kurdish parties is necessary to obtain "employment and educational opportunities" in Iraqi Kurdistan. The US State department report said that "Kurdish authorities abused and discriminated against minorities in the North, including Turcomen, Arabs, Christians, and Shabak", and that Kurdish authorities "denied services to some villages, arrested minorities without due process and