Some Assyrians activists claim they have suffered not only from Arabization but also Kurdification in Iraqi Kurdistan. Assyrian activist have claimed that the number of Christians live in Iraqi Kurdistan have been reduced due to the destruction of villages or Kurdification policies. Christians and Assyrian Christians used to constitute a much higher proportion of the population of northern Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan than they do today. Their numbers were seriously reduced due to massacres, flight and other reasons. In Kurdistan there are also crypto-Christians, people who were outwardly Kurdish Muslims but still remembered having been Armenians or Nestorian Christians. Relations between the remaining Christians and the Kurds were often been less than cordial. According to Assyrian expert Michael Youash, in some cases Christians became refugees because Kurds seized their land and the KRG would not provide any help in returning the land to them. Michael Youash also reported that in 2007 there were "numerous reports of Kurdish authorities discriminating against minorities in the North...Authorities denied services to some villages, arrested minorities without due process and pressured minority schools to teach in the Kurdish language". Additionally, several reports have been written about those Christians who do not get "political" representation and therefore do not succeed in expanding their schools, and are shut out from all but the most basic funding. Assyrian groups reported a series of bombings in 1998 and 1999 and criticized the investigation into these crimes by the Kurdish authorities. Assyrians were also victims of attacks by the Kurdistan Workers Party, and Christians often are trapped in the middle of intra-Kurdish fighting. In 1997, six Assyrians died in an attack by the PKK in Dohuk. According to a 1999 country report by the US government, the Assyrian International News Agency reported that an Assyrian woman Helena Aloun Sawa, killed and raped. She was a housekeeper for a KDP politician, and Assyrians have alleged that the case "resembles a well-established pattern" of complicity by Kurdish authorities in attacks against Assyrian Christians in northern Iraq". In more recent times, some scholars have noted that in northern Iraq, in the area of "ancient Assyria, Kurdish expansion has come at the