AT LEAST ONE CHALDO-ASSYRIAN has been elected to Iraq's new National Assembly:

Iraqi exile voters put Chaldo-Assyrian Christian in Iraqi assembly

By Susannah A. Nesmith

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq -Yonadam Kanna owes his seat in the new Iraqi National Assembly to people from places such as Detroit and San Jose, Calif., who voted for his slate in the Jan. 30 elections.

Without the 18,538 votes he received from expatriates, Kanna's slate would have been about 12,000 votes short of the number required to secure a seat in the assembly. Though more than 260,000 expatriates voted, Kanna's National Two Rivers slate is one of only three that received more than half their votes from abroad, and it's the only one that owes its seat on the assembly to expatriate votes.

[...]

He's hoping to barter his lone vote for the protection of his community by working with the new opposition led by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to block a constitution based on Islamic law. The slate that took the most seats, about 140, was blessed by a conservative Shiite Muslim cleric and has ties to the fundamentalist regime in Iran, but many here think it won't have a big enough majority in the 275-seat assembly to form a religious-based government.

Kanna's constituents in San Jose are proud that they helped put him in a position where he may be able to help prevent that. But they too are concerned that many Chaldo-Assyrians were prevented from voting, either because polling stations abroad were too far from their homes - a common complaint that crosses ethnic and religious lines - or because of irregularities in Ninevah province, where the Chaldo-Assyrian community is strongest.

[...]