In the beginning of December 2016, the Assyrian professor Efrem Yildiz was invited to the Assyro-Chaldean club in Mechelen, Belgium, to lecture about Assyrian identity, especially the different names within the Assyrian people. The club is inside the building of the Chaldean church in the city. When Patriarch Louis Sako heard about the lecture, he ordered the local priests to boycott it and to tell their congregation not to attend. However, about a hundred members of the club did attend, because Prof. Yildiz is an appreciated scholar who knows many of them personally. The reason Patriarch Saco tried to stop the lecture may have been a letter of Prof. Yildiz to him last year when Patriarch Sako established a Chaldean League in Paris, where he denounces any connection to the Assyrians.He also wonders how a Chaldean patriarch would like to create a Chaldean nation in Nineveh – the heartland of Ashur.

Prof. Yildiz is determined to reject such divisive acts whoever is committing them. He is a member of Chaldean Catholic church of Babylon and urges Assyrian cleric not to interfere in politics, because this has harmed the Assyrian Nation in the past, he says from his office in the University of Salamanca, Spain, where he holds the professur in Semitic languages.