Assyrians in Iraq
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Assyrians in Iraq number at an estimated 1,300,000.[citation needed] Christian by faith, Aramaic by tongue, the Assyrians claim to be the indigenous people of Iraq, the country's third largest ethnic group, and descendants of those who ruled the territory out of ancient Assyria.
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[edit] British Mandate
In 1918, Britain resettled 20,000 Assyrians in Iraqi refugee camps in Baquba and Mandan after Turkey violently quelled a British-inspired Assyrian rebellion. From there, due to their higher level of education, many gravitated toward Kirkuk and Habbaniya, where they were indispensable in the administration of the oil and military projects. As a result, approximately three-fourths of the Assyrians who had sided with the British during World War I found themselves living in Kurdish areas of Iraq. Thousands of Assyrian men had seen service in the Iraqi Levies, a force under British officers separate from the regular Iraqi army. Pro-British, they had been apprehensive of Iraqi independence. Most of those thus resettled by the British have gone into exile, although by the end of the twentieth century, almost all of those who remain were born in Iraq. Assyrians living in northern Iraq today are those whose ancestry lies in the north originally. Many of these, however, in places like Berwari, have been displaced by Kurds since World War I. This process has continued throughout the twentieth century: as Kurds have expanded in population, Assyrians have come under attack as in 1933, and as a result have fled from Iraq. (Stafford, Tragedy of the Assyrians, 1935)
Unlike the Kurds, the Assyrians scarcely expected a nation-state of their own after World War I, but they did demand restitution from Turkey for the material and population losses they had suffered, especially in northwest Iran, a neutral party in WWI invaded by Turkish forces. Their pressure for some temporal authority in the north of Iraq under the Assyrian patriarch, the Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII, was flatly refused by British and Iraqis alike.
[edit] Independent Kingdom of Iraq
In 1933, the Iraqi government held the Patriarch of the Church of the East, the Mar Shamun, under house arrest. When he left Iraq to appeal to the British with regard to how the Assyrians were being mistreated in Iraq contrary to the agreement at Iraq's independence to refrain from discrimination against minorities, he was stripped of his citizenship and refused reentry.
During July 1933, about 800 armed Assyrians headed for the Syrian border, where they were turned back. While King Faisal had briefly left the country for medical reasons, the Minister of Interior, Hikmat Sulayman, adopted a policy aimed at a final solution of the Assyrian "problem". This policy was implemented by a Kurd, General Bakr Sidqi. After engaging in several clashes with the Assyrians, on 11 August 1933, Sidqi permitted his men to kill about 3,000 Assyrians, including women and children, at the Assyrian villages of Sumail (Simele) district, and later at Suryia. Having scapegoated the Assyrians as dangerous national traitors, this massacre became a symbol of national pride, and enhanced Sidqi's prestige. The British, though represented by a powerful military presence as provided by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, failed to intervene, and indeed helped white-washed the event at the League of Nations.
The Assyrian repression marked the entrance into Iraqi politics of the military, a pattern that has periodically re-emerged since 1958, and offered an excuse for enlarging conscription. The hugely popular Assyrian massacre, an indication of the latent anti-Christian atmosphere, also set the stage for the increased prominence of Bakr Sidqi. In October 1936, Bakr Sidqi staged the first military coup in the modern Arab world.
The World Directory of Minorities states that there are over 300,000 Chaldean Assyrian Christians in Iraq and that they live mainly in Baghdad. Until the 1950s, Chaldeans were mostly settled in Mosul -- in 1932, 70 percent of Iraqi Christians (Assyrian and Chaldean) lived there, but by 1957, only 47 percent remained, as they migrated southward due in part to violence and regional and political tensions. It was estimated that about half of Iraq's Christian's lived in Baghdad by 1979, accounting for 14 percent of that city's population
This period also marks the intensification of denominational antagonism among Aramaic speakers in Iraq as some church institutions began to distance themselves from the members of the Church of the East who were seen as magnets for Muslim antagonism. It is from this period that, as the new Mosul-born patriarch of the Assyrian Apostolic Church of Antioch and All the East (Jacobite) came into the pinnacle of this church's hierarchy, he began to move the Church away from the term Assyrian and toward the term "Syrian." At the same time, this Church moved its See to Damascus, Syria.
[edit] Republic of Iraq
[edit] Recognition of the Syriac language by the Ba'thist regime
Revolution Command Council Decree No. 251 of 20 February 1972 recognized the cultural rights of Syriac-speaking citizens (Assyrians, Chaldeans and members of the East Syrian Church). Syriac was to be the language of tuition at all primary schools in which the majority of pupils spoke that language in addition to Arabic. Syriac was also to be taught at intermediate and secondary schools in which the majority of students spoke that language in addition to Arabic. Special programmes in Syriac were to be broadcast on public radio and television and three Syriac-language magazines were to be published. An Association of Syriac-Speaking Authors and Writers has also been established. [1] The bill turned out to be a failure. A radio station created as the result of this decree was closed after a few months. The two magazines were allowed to be published printed 90 percent of their material in Arabic. No school was allowed to teach in Syriac. [2]
[edit] Post-Ba'thist Iraq
In modern times, Assyrians, for whom no reliable census figures exist in Iraq (as they do not for Kurds or Turkmen), have been doubly mistreated; first by their Kurdish neighbors, then by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime. Assyrians were deprived of their cultural and national rights while at the same time the Ba'athist regime tried to co-opt their history. In northern Iraq today, a similar pattern is emerging as Kurds attempt to rewrite the history of the region to give it a Kurdish flavor and diminish its historic Assyrian heritage. As in Ba'athist Iraq, there is a strong tendency in Iraq today to recognize only two ethnic groups: Arab or Kurd. However, the Kurdish Autonomous Region has claimed that it has been instrumental in the renovation and support of Assyrian churches and schools.
After Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003, the Assyrian Democratic Movement was one of the smaller political parties that emerged in the social chaos of the occupation. Its officials say that while members of the Assyrian Democratic Movement also took part in the liberation of the key oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul in the north, the Assyrians were not 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.
