Iraq's Assyrians -- Four Beleaguered Christian Minorities

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Part THREE of a FIVE-part series on Iraq's minorities.

• Go to Part One: Iraq's Yazidis -- A Minority within a Minority

• See Part Two: The Turkomans of Iraq -- A Minority with Major Impact

• See Part Four: The Ma'dan -- Iraq's Marsh Arabs

• See Part Five: "To Look Death in the Eye" -- The Kurds of Iraq

 ALSO: Sunnis and Shi'ites for Beginners (Basic facts about these two sects of Islam)
  

Assurbanipal, Sargon, Ashurnasirpal. These were big names in Assyria, the old kingdom that reached greatness from the 9th century B.C. to its fall in 612 B.C. The name of Nineveh, its capital, appears often in the Bible. It stood on the Tigris River and overlooked the site of modern Mosul, Iraq, on the opposite bank. [1]

Iraqi Sheik Ali Qawal Cholo believes that his Yazidi religion goes back to these times, with a temple in ancient Babylon. The truth is that the founder of this unique Kurdish faith lived much later, in the 12 century A.D. [2]

The true descendents of the Assyrians are Iraq's Christians, who bear their ancestors' name to this day. They speak Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew. Assyrian Neo-Aramaic descends from ancient Aramaic, used within the old Assyrian Empire. The survival of Aramaic as a spoken language, said Ronald Johnson, "is an important indication that the Assyrians have been a cohesive, endogamous (marrying within the community) group for more than two thousand years." [3]

Christ and other Jews of his time spoke Aramaic (Jesus' words on the cross as recorded in the New Testament are in Aramaic: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" -- "Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?"). [4] Aramaic stands in comparison with several other Semitic languages in the list of numbers 1-10 below. Note that Akkadian was the language of the ancient Assyrians (the Babylonian language was a separate dialect of Akkadian):

Akkadian: ishte:n, shena, shalash, erbe, h.amish, shishshu, sebe, sama:ne, tishe, esher.
Modern Aramaic: âhad, itr, tlo:ta:, árpa`, hámsha:, shé:,'tta:, shub`a:, tmó:nya:, tésh`a:, `ásra:.
Classical Syriac Aramaic: hadh, tere:n, tela:tha, 'arbe`a:, hamsha:, `eshta:, shab`a:, tema:nia:, tesh`a:, `eshra:.
Classical Aramaic: xadh, tere:yn, tela:tha:h, 'arebe`a:h, xamesha:h, shitha:h, shi:Be`a:h, tema:neya:h, ti:she`a:h, `aserh.
Iraqi Arabic: waahid, thinayn, thilaatha, 'arba`a, xamsa, sitta, sab`a, thimaanya, tis'a, `ashra.
Classical Hebrew: 'ahat, shtayim, shâlôsh, 'arba,` hâmêsh, shêsh, sheba,` shemôneh, têsha`, `eser. [5]

In 1994, 30,000 people spoke Aramaic in Iraq. A larger community of over 210,000 people speak Assyrian Neo-Aramaic in Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Iran, Italy, Lebanon, Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia. Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The worldwide Assyrian etnic population is even greater: 4,250,000 in 1994 (the Ethnologue website reported that "In some countries, young people speak the language of that country, not Assyrian Neo-Aramaic.") [6]

Modern Assyrians are also known as Chaldeans, Nestorians and Surayi (their name for themselves), and attend four distinct churches: [7]

• Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, whose roots go back to the capital of the Roman province of Syria. Although Greek was the language of the city, Syriac Aramaic was spoken in the countryside. According to Acts 11:26, Antioch was the first place where the followers of Jesus were called "Christians" and a sojourn for Saints Peter and Paul. During the Persian invasions of Syria in the 6th century A.D., large numbers of Syriac Christians were deported to Mesopotamia, the region of modern Iraq. [8]

• Nestorians began as a heretical sect of Christianity that taught that Christ had two separate persons -- human and divine. This doctrine was at odds with the orthodox teachings of the single person of Jesus. [9]  A number of them came from Syria to Mesopotamia at the same time as the deported Syrian Orthodox believers. The Kurds and Turks massacred entire communities of Nestorian in the 19th and 20th centuries, and today only a few congregations exist in the Middle East. The Nestorian Church had about 50,000 members worldwide in 2004. [10]

• Chaldean Catholic and Syrian Catholic, with worldwide memberships of 417,000 and 100,000 respectively. These communions are part of five other Middle Eastern  churches in a "Catholic family" with full ties to the Vatican. [11]

According to the Library of Congress,  "although official Iraqi statistics (under Saddam Hussein) [did]  not refer to (Iraqi Assyrians) as an ethnic group, they are believed to represent about 133,000 persons or less than 1 percent of the population. Descendants of ancient Mesopotamian peoples, they speak Aramaic. The Assyrians live mainly in the major cities and in the rural areas of northeastern Iraq where they tend to be professionals and businessmen or independent farmers." [12]

Assyrian husbands treat their wives almost as equals. In Iraq, the Christian women openly participate in social events and are often more literate than Muslim males. A limit to the near-equality is the Assyrians' patriarchal tradition, which puts a wife under a husband's authority. [13]

Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was born Mikhail Yuhanna, the son of a Assyrian waiter. A member of the Chaldean Church, he grew up speaking Aramaic. Aziz was often seen smoking a cigar and wearing military fatigues. He carried an ivory-handled pistol. Tariq Aziz was the first and only Christian to serve in the Iraqi Baath Party, and -- despite religious protocols excluding Christians from the government -- he was a staunch defender of Sunni Muslim interests before the fall of Hussein. [14]

Other Assyrians have fared far worse in their homeland. They have fought the Kurds, forced to migrate into other parts of Iraq, and coerced into combat service. Agressive "Arabzization" on the part of the Hussein government drove Christians out of their communities an into the majority population. Such hardships, however, have unified Assyrians in the past, despite their religious differences and internal disputes.

New troubles came with the Iraq War. Although the more than one million Assyrian Christians once composed five percent of the population, they now make up over 40 percent of the nation's refugees. Most flee to Syria and Jordan, escaping attacks by Sunni and Shiite militants and forced out by Kurdish seizures of Assyrian land. Because many fear leaving their homes, Assyrian Churches in Baghdad have begun to close their doors. [15]

A decade before the war, Assyrians were divided on the question of a separate homeland for their people. [16] Now, wrote Keith Roshangar of Christianity Today, "advocates for Assyrian Christians are pushing for a multiethnic self-governing region in northern Iraq, as a haven for Iraqi minorities." [16]

Sources Cited:

[1] "Assyria" and "Nineveh." The Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia University Press, 2000.. General Reference Center. Gale. DISCUS Remote Patron Access ITWeb. Accessed on September 28 , 2007

[2] Daniszewski, John. "Ancient Faith Is a Reminder of Iraq's Diversity." Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2003, p. A5. SIRS Researcher, SIRS Knowledge Source. Accessed on September 28, 2007.

[3] Johnson, Ronald. "Assyrians" in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures: Africa and the Middle East, Volume 10. Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1995; p. 27.

[4] "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" in the Columbia Enyclopedia, http://www.bartelby.org/65/el/Eli-Eli.html. Accessed on September 29, 2007.

[5] "Numbers from 1 to 10 in Over 5000 Languages" website,"Numbers in Afro-Asiatic and Caucasian Languages" web page, http://www.zompist.com/mide.htm#afro. Accessed on September 28, 2007.

[6] "Ethnologue" website, "Assyrian Neo-Aramaic" web page,
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=aii. Accessed on September 29, 2007.

[7] Johnson, p. 27.

[8] Roberson. Ronald C. "Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch" in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Second edition. New York, Thomson Gale. 2005. Volume 13, pp. 8938-8939.

[9] Cross, F. L. (Editor). The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958; pp. 259-260.

[10] Meyendorff, John. "Nestorian church." Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. 2007. Grolier Online. Accessed on September 29, 2007.

[11] Pacini, Andrea. "Christianity in the Middle East" in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Second edition. New York, Thomson Gale. 2005. Volume 3, p. 1673.

[12] Countrystudies website, web page http://countrystudies.us/iraq/33.htm. This website contains the on-line versions of  books previously published in hard copy by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress as part of the Country  Studies/Area Handbook Series sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Army between 1986 and 1998. Each study offers a comprehensive description and analysis of the country or region's historical setting, geography, society, economy, political system, and foreign policy.

[13] Johnson, pp. 27-28.

[14] "Tariq Mikhayl Aziz." Biography Resource Center Online. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center.

Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. Accessed on September 29, 2007.

[15] Roshangar, Keith. "Fleeing Nineveh: threatened by persistent violence, Assyrian Christians want to govern themselves." Christianity Today 51.1 (Jan 2007): 22(2). General Reference Center. Gale. DISCUS Remote Patron Access ITWeb. Accessed on September 29, 2007.

[16] Johnson, p. 28.

[17] Roshangar.