The Assyrians are the direct descendents of the people of the ancient Assyrian Empire. Subject to continuous invasions, massive population losses, and absorption into surrounding cultures, they have managed to maintain their identity, language, culture, and Christians religion for millennia following the fall of the capital of the Empire, Nineveh, in 612 B.C. Increasingly hostile invaders have often murdered, converted, expelled, and conquered the Assyrian people, but they are still a community in the Middle East, with these dangers still threatening their existence. They are the indigenous nation of Iraq and what was Mesopotamia (including parts of Iran, Turkey, and Syria).

From Nick AlJeloo’s “Who are the Assyrians?”, The Assyrian Australian Academic Society:
The Assyrian nation, apart from undergoing an ongoing genocide, has also suffered a cultural genocide that has attacked the Assyrian identity and questioned its origins and unity as a people. Assyrians have come to be called Nestorians, Chaldeans, Jacobites, Syriacs, Syrians, Maronites and Melkites through religious influences and by the governments that now rule over portions of what is their ancestral homeland. As esteemed social anthropologist Dr. Arian Ishaya of UCLA in her paper Intellectual Domination and the Assyrians states, there are different ways of dominating a people, those most direct being to take hold of their land and resources, deny them statehood, and force their manpower to do the labour work or fight the battles of the conqueror. But she also mentions that domination may also come in a more indirect, abstract form which is intellectual, this form being the most dangerous as it penetrates the victim’s inner feelings and thoughts. Thus, she determines, the victim remains unaware and willingly subjugates itself to intellectual domination.

…The Assyrians call themselves and other people of Aramaic-speaking heritage Assyrians for a very simple and convincing reason: they are the age-old inhabitants of ancient Assyria. It is their homeland. They have churches there that date as far back as third and fourth century AD and still others, such as St. Mary at Kharput and St. Mary at Urmia, that are of apostolic foundation. That is sufficient and says it all. There is no need to engage in the inconclusive argument of racial and cultural purity. When any nation says that it is what it is, it is that because its forefathers inhabited that region since time immemorial. The Assyrians say they are Assyrians because their forefathers inhabited Assyria and the French say that France is their homeland because they have lived there for many centuries. One claim is as valid as the other. What makes the French claim more respectable and that of the Assyrians questionable isn’t science. It is politics pure and simple. Thus, Dr. Ishaya concludes, “ … the question of whether the contemporary Assyrians are Assyrians, should never be asked. When a scholar makes that a topic of research, he is playing POLITICAL GAME in the guise of science. There is no excuse for the academics to remain naive any longer. The scholars have no choice but to decide what they want to do with their profession: put it in the service of the people or use it to promote the interest of the ruling powers. Whatever choice they make, they can be sure that they can no longer fool the people.”

World War I witnessed the first modern tragedy for the Assyrian nation. While no hard numbers exist, it is estimated that two-thirds of the Assyrian population living in Turkey died during the Genocide of 1915-1918, along with Armenians and Greeks. Assyrians were forced from their villages by the Turks and Kurds, and either killed or forced to walk out of Turkey, into Iraq and Iran. Most died on the journey. The Assyrians settled with relatives or refugee camps and eventually joined the other Assyrians in Iraq and Iran.

Between the years of the Assyrian Genocide of 1915-1918 until the Simele Massacre of 1933, Assyrians in Iraq lobbied the League of Nations for protection, especially as the end of the British Mandate in 1932 neared. Assyrian groups, mainly led by the then Assyrian Patriarch of the Church of the East Mar Eshai Shimoun XXIII, were rejected, ignored, or angrily protested by the Iraqi government, with warnings to the Assyrians to cease asking for foreign protection and land in Iraq. One of the final petitions in October of 1931, after all of the pleas asking for a safe haven and protection from the Iraqi authorities went unheard, asked for aid in helping Assyrians leave Iraq before the British Mandate ended in the following year, for fear that a British exit from Iraq would lead to the extermination of Assyrians.

The Iraqi government, in response to a League of Nations request to attempt to find land for the Assyrians, placed Assyrians on malaria ridden land, and hundreds of Assyrians died from the disease.

As the British Mandate ended in October of 1932, the Assyrians were left to fend for themselves. Less than one year later, the Assyrians were massacred in Simele, Iraq. Iraqi soldiers, under Kurdish general Bakkir Sidqi, murdered between 3-5,000 Assyrian men, women, and children between August 11-14, 1932.

After Simele, new plans were forged by the League on the Assyrian Question. Nothing was resolved, and Assyrians continued living in Iraq, without protection or autonomous status in their villages in Northern Iraq. Until World War II, Assyrians continued living in Iraq at the mercy of the central government. They proved, however, their loyalty to the British at the famous Battle of Habbaniya, when 1500 Assyrian levies held the British Air Force Base against 60,000 rebelling Iraqis that had claimed loyalty to the Germans. But, again, their loyalty went unrewarded.

After World War II, Assyrians remained in Iraq, Syria, and Iran (with small populations still in Turkey). However, by this time, the events of the early 20th century had caused mass exodus from the Middle East, and Assyrian communities were, by this time, active in the U.S. (mainly New England and Chicago), and also found in Brazil, England, Russia, and other parts of the world. As the Cold War began its domino effect in the Middle East, so too did Ba’athism and Islamism – Assyrians began leaving for the West on a larger scale. The Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) took its toll on Assyrians in both countries as well. The Persian Gulf war in 1990-91 saw another mass exodus of Assyrians from Iraq, resettling in Canada, England, Jordan, the U.S., and Australia. Finally, the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the ensuing conflict and insurgency, and the partitioning of a Kurdish north, is seeing a new wave of persecution and cultural genocide against the Assyrians, particularly by the Kurdish populations in Northern Iraq.

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