Utopia or plausible goal? Time will dictate the efforts of today’s Assyrians, an ethnic community of barely half a million souls distributed mainly across Iraqi and Syrian lands, for reaching their national demands and preserving their hallmarks. Among them stands out, above all, a Christianity that they defend with pride and many difficulties – persecutions, endless killings – in the middle of the Islamic ocean of the Middle East region.
“The Assyrians continue to be persecuted today, whether for religious, national or ethnic reasons,” he told LA RAZÓN Robin Betshmuel, professor and researcher at Salahaddin University (Erbil, Iraq). “Their identity, which is manifested in a history, a mother tongue and historical lands, traditions, customs and celebrations, personal names and their own titles or uniforms, all of them signs of an identity in danger,” the specialist in Syriac culture.
Although the Assyrian population that continues to populate historic Mesopotamia -especially in northern Iraq- is increasingly meager and has been seriously diminished in recent decades, a nationalist movement that emerged at the end of the 19th century is today striving to defend the identity of this people and prevent their assimilation by their neighbors. Convinced of being heirs of the old Assyrian and Neo-Assyrian Empire, which history considers extinct in the 7th century BC, their goal is to resurrect the Assyrian homeland in the heart of the Middle East. One of its representatives is the Assyrian Democratic Movement, a party founded in 1979. Since 2014, its militia, the Nineveh Plains Protection Unitssupported by the United States, fought against the Islamic States (IS) together with the Iraqi Army.
Today the movement proposes national borders around the plains of Nineveh, the former historical capital of the Assyrian Empire, over which they at least hope to create an autonomy similar to that enjoyed by the Kurds in northern Iraq (a proposal already raised by the Assyrian ethno-nationalist movement after World War I ). These days, Mosul, on ancient Nineveh, a symbol of the rise and fall of the Islamic State, marks the southwestern limits of the Assyria that nationalists propose today. The few dozen Christians who have survived the persecutions celebrate mass again these days in the monastery of San Miguel twenty years after the fall of the regime of the dictator Saddam Hussein.
The seizure of Mosul by the Islamic State forced the displacement of more than 150,000 Assyrians. “We are a Semitic people, we are not Arabs or Kurds, much older than these two groups, nor do we accept the name of Kurdistan for our lands,” the professor of the Department of Hebrew and Aramaic Studies of the University of Salamanca, Efrem, told LA RAZÓN. Yildiz.
If there is pride for the Assyrian people today, a fundamental component of their contemporary identity, it is that of their Christianity. A Christianity that has led them to suffer persecution and death in Iraq and Syria and discrimination against Muslims in the region as a whole. “The reality is very difficult for Assyrians in the practice of their religion in countries with an Islamic majority. They are second-class citizens for the authorities and it is impossible for them to lead a Christian public life”, explains the professor. Efrem Yildiz.
Far from professing a single Christianity, the Assyrians are divided into a dozen confessions. The most numerous of these is the Chaldean Catholic Church, presided over by the Baghdad-Catholic Patriarch of the Chaldeans from the Iraqi capital. They are followed, according to the number of faithful, by the Assyrian Church of the East (known as Nestorian) and the Syro-Orthodox, belonging to the family of Eastern Orthodox churches. All were founded in the first century by Thomas the Apostle and his disciples Saint Aday (Thaddeus of Edessa) and Saint Mari according to tradition, and continue to use East Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic, which was the language of Jesus) as their language of speech. the liturgy. There are also Assyrians linked to other Eastern and Protestant churches.
In addition to religion, the other great hallmark of Assyria’s identity is its language, which also experiences a slow and irreversible decline. In addition to Arabic, Kurdish or Turkish, the language of this people is modern Assyrian (sureth-surayt), a name under which the two main dialects (eastern and western) of modern Aramaic are found, a Semitic language with more three thousand years old that was once the majority in Mesopotamia.
With the disappearance of the Neo-Assyrian Empire more than 2,700 years ago – with the entry into Babylon of the Persian king Cyrus II the Great – began the long decline of this Semitic people, who miraculously continue to claim their future in Mesopotamia today. In the 20th century, Assyrians suffered genocide at the hands of Turkish and Kurdish nationalists at various stages: 1843 and 1846, the 1890s, World War I, Turkish independence, and in the early 1920s, in the same context as those suffered by the Armenians and Greeks.
More than 250,000 Assyrians lost their lives in massacres in present-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
More recently, Assyrians have suffered the consequences of the rise of jihadism. The Islamic State, which imposed its caliphate of terror straddling Syria and Iraq between 2014 and 2017, targeted the last Christians of ancient Mesopotamia in a special way. In addition to the human losses, the Assyrians have seen their heritage in the form of churches and monasteries systematically destroyed by Muslim fanatics.
Most of the Assyrians live, however, in a large diaspora of almost three and a half million people distributed between the United States, Australia, Canada, Sweden or Germany, as well as other countries in the Middle East such as Jordan or Lebanon. In it, the Assyrians continue to work to maintain their traditions and freely develop their Christian faith. The emigration of Assyrian Christians to different latitudes of the Western world –as well as other Christians in the region– continues to trickle incessantly.
In our country, the University of Salamanca has been a pioneer in the study and dissemination of the history and linguistic heritage of the Assyrians. Not surprisingly, in 2020, Salamanca University created the Nineveh Chairwhich almost a year ago held its first international congress.
“Given the unfortunate reality on the ground, it will be more feasible to recover the Assyrian legacy in the West, as we are also working in Spain, than in our historical territory,” Professor Yildiz, the main promoter of the university chair, admits to LA RAZÓN.
Like other ethnic groups that profess Christianity, the Assyrians face a bleak future in one of the most hostile areas for religious minorities, although they are not willing to break their will to defend their faith and their historical territory when they have just celebrated the year 6773 of your calendar.
Meanwhile, Christianity, its dozens of churches from Cairo to Baghdad – still account for less than 5% of the population in Iraq, Syria, Israel, Turkey or Iran– is slowly approaching the disappearance of the territory where it was born and forged two thousand years ago.
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