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Anti-Assyrian sentiment, also known as anti-Assyrianism and Assyrophobia, is a diverse spectrum of negative feelings, dislikes, fears, aversion, racism, derision and/or prejudice towards Assyrians, Assyria, and Assyrian culture. Anti-Assyrian sentiment is largely fueled by an Anti-Christian sentiment, and very rarely for their ethnicity itself.
In October 1917, the Ottomans launched the Persian campaign with the hopes of capturing more land. The Assyrians, led by Agha Petros held them off until June 1918, however, up to 100,000 Assyrians left Persia in 1918, but around half died of Turkish and Kurdish massacres, starvation, disease, or famine. About 80 percent of Assyrian clergy and influential leaders had perished. [1]
The city of Urmia and the areas around it, 200 villages were ravaged, 200,000 of Assyrian dead, and hundreds of thousands more Assyrians starving to death in exile. The Associated Press reported that in the vicinity of Urmia, "Turkish regular troops and Kurds are persecuting and massacring Assyrian Christians." The victims included 800 massacred near Urmia, and 2,000 dead from disease. Two hundred Assyrians were burned to death inside a church, and the Russians had discovered more than 700 bodies of massacre victims in the village of Hafdewan outside Urmia, "mostly naked and mutilated", some with gunshot wounds, others decapitated, and others chopped to pieces. The New York Times reported on 11 October that 12,000 Assyrian Christians had died of massacre, hunger, or disease; thousands of girls as young as seven had been raped in sex attacks, or forcibly converted to Islam; Christian villages had been destroyed, and three-fourths of these Christian villages were burned to the ground. [2]
Christian priests were prime targets; eight Assyrian priests were killed during the massacre, including one beheaded and another burned alive. [3] Back in the city of Duhok, 600 Assyrians were killed by Sidqi's men. [4] In the end, around 65 Assyrian villages were targeted in the Mosul and Dohuk districts. [5] [6] [7] [8] The Simele massacre of the Assyrian people is often regarded as a phase of the Assyrian genocide beginning in August 1914 in the early days of what became World War I. Today, most of these villages are inhabited by Kurds. The main campaign lasted until August 16, but violent raids on Assyrians were being reported up to the end of the month. After the campaign, Bakr Sidqi was invited to Baghdad for a victory rally. [9] The campaign resulted in one third of the Assyrian population of Iraq fleeing to Syria. [10]
After the Invasion of Iraq and fall of Saddam Hussein, Assyrians became victims of Islamist violence. During the period of 2003–2013, there were increasing amounts of Church attacks, beheadings, and bombings of Assyrians. [11]
After the Fall of Mosul, ISIS demanded that Assyrian Christians living in the city convert to Islam, pay jizyah, or face execution, by July 19, 2014. [12] [13] [14] [15] ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi further noted that Christians who do not agree to follow those terms must "leave the borders of the Islamic Caliphate" within a specified deadline. This resulted in a complete Assyrian exodus from Mosul, marking the end of 1,800 years of continuous Christian presence. [16] A church mass was not held in Mosul for the first time in nearly 2 thousand years. [17]
On 23 February 2015, 150 Assyrians from villages near Tell Tamer in northeastern Syria were kidnapped by ISIS. [18] [19] At Assyrian Christian farming villages on the banks of the Khabur River in Northeast Syria, 253 people, 51 of them children and 84 of them were women, with one account claiming that ISIS is demanding $22 million (or roughly $100,000 per person) for their release. [20] On 8 October 2015, ISIS released a video showing three of the Assyrian men kidnapped in Khabur being murdered. It was reported that 202 of the 253 kidnapped Assyrians were still in captivity, each one with a demanded ransom of $100,000. [21] On 25 October, hundreds of civilians were trapped in Sadad, Syria, with Archbishop Silwanos Al-Nemeh saying that the situation was dire and that they were in fear of a massacre. [22] Also, opposition fighters entered the Mar Theodore Church damaging it and stealing Church items. [23] More than 100 government soldiers and 100 rebels, including 80 jihadists from ISIS and al-Nusra, were killed in the fighting. Foreign rebel fighters were also among the dead. [24] The rebels retreated to the surrounding farmland, with the military in pursuit, and the government news agency reported that the militants had vandalized Sadad's Saint Theodor Church and much of its infrastructure. [25]
Assyrians are an indigenous ethnic group native to Mesopotamia, a geographical region in West Asia. Modern Assyrians descend directly from Ancient Mesopotamians such as ancient Assyrians and Babylonians. Modern Assyrians may culturally self-identify as Syriacs, Chaldeans, or Arameans for religious, geographic, and tribal identification.
Bakr Sidqi al-Askari was an Iraqi general of Kurdish origin, born in 1890 and assassinated on 11 August 1937, in Mosul.
Human rights in pre-Saddam Iraq were often lacking to various degrees among the various regimes that ruled the country. Human rights abuses in the country predated the rule of Saddam Hussein.
The Sayfo, also known as the Seyfo or the Assyrian genocide, was the mass slaughter and deportation of Assyrian/Syriac Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Persia's Azerbaijan province by Ottoman forces and some Kurdish tribes during World War I.
Tesqopa or Tel Skuf, also Tel Eskof or Tall Asqaf is a town in northern Iraq located approximately 19 miles north of Mosul. The town is populated by Assyrians and they are members of the Chaldean Catholic Church.
Bartella is a town that is located in the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq, about 21 kilometres east of Mosul.
Iraqi Assyrians are an ethnic and linguistic minority group, indigenous to Upper Mesopotamia. Assyrians in Iraq are those Assyrians still residing in the country of Iraq, and those in the Assyrian diaspora who are of Iraqi-Assyrian heritage. They share a common history and ethnic identity, rooted in shared linguistic, cultural and religious traditions, with Assyrians in Iran, Assyrians in Turkey and Assyrians in Syria, as well as with the Assyrian diaspora. Assyrian diaspora in Detroit, Areas with large expat populations include Chicago and Sydney.
Tell Tamer also known as Tal Tamr or Tal Tamir, is a town in western al-Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria. It is the administrative center of the Tell Tamer Subdistrict consisting of 13 municipalities.
The Assyrian homeland, Assyria, refers to the homeland of the Assyrian people within which Assyrian civilisation developed, located in their indigenous Upper Mesopotamia. The territory that forms the Assyrian homeland is, similarly to the rest of Mesopotamia, currently divided between present-day Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. In Iran, the Urmia Plain forms a thin margin of the ancestral Assyrian homeland in the north-west, and the only section of the Assyrian homeland beyond the Mesopotamian region. The majority of Assyrians in Iran currently reside in the capital city, Tehran.
The Simele massacre, also known as the Assyrian affair, was committed by the Kingdom of Iraq, led by Bakr Sidqi, during a campaign systematically targeting the Assyrians in and around Simele in August 1933.
Hakkari, was a historical mountainous region lying to the south of Lake Van, encompassing parts of the modern provinces of Hakkâri, Şırnak, Van in Turkey and Dohuk in Iraq. During the late Ottoman Empire it was a sanjak within the old Vilayet of Van.
The Christians of Iraq are considered to be one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world.
Christianity, which originated in the Middle East during the 1st century AD, is a significant minority religion within the region, characterized by the diversity of its beliefs and traditions, compared to Christianity in other parts of the Old World. Christians now make up approximately 5% of the Middle Eastern population, down from 13% in the early 20th century. Cyprus is the only Christian majority country in the Middle East, with Christians forming between 76% and 78% of the country's total population, most of them adhering to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Lebanon has the second highest proportion of Christians in the Middle East, around 40%, predominantly Maronites. Egypt has the next largest proportion of Christians, at around 10% of its total population. Copts, numbering around 10 million, constitute the single largest Christian community in the Middle East.
The Assyrian independence movement is a political movement and ethno-nationalist desire of ethnic Assyrians to live in their indigenous Assyrian homeland in northern Mesopotamia under the self-governance of an Assyrian State.
Monastery of the Martyrs Mar Behnam and Marth Sarah, is a Syriac Catholic monastery in northern Iraq in the village Khidr Ilyas close to the town of Beth Khdeda. The tomb of Mar Benham was heavily damaged on March 19, 2015, by the Islamic State, and the exterior murals were desecrated in all of the monastery's buildings. Repair work restoring the monastery and the tomb of Mar Behnam to its pre-ISIS condition was completed by early December 2018.
The Assyrian exodus from Iraq is a part of refers to the mass flight and expulsion of ethnic Assyrians from Iraq, a process which was initiated from the beginning of Iraq War in 2003 and continues to this day. Leaders of Iraq's Assyrian community estimate that over two-thirds of the Iraqi Assyrian population may have fled the country or been internally displaced since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 until 2011. Reports suggest that whole neighborhoods of Assyrians have cleared out in the cities of Baghdad and Basra, and that Sunni insurgent groups and militias have threatened Assyrians. Following the campaign of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in northern Iraq in August 2014, one quarter of the remaining Iraqi Assyrians fled the Jihadists, finding refuge in Turkey and Kurdistan Region.
The persecution of Christians by the Islamic State involves the systematic mass murder of Christian minorities, within the regions of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya controlled by the Islamic terrorist group Islamic State. Persecution of Christian minorities climaxed following the Syrian civil war and later by its spillover.
Between 1 and 15 August 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) expanded territory in northern Iraq under their control. In the region north and west from Mosul, the Islamic State conquered Zumar, Sinjar, Wana, Mosul Dam, Qaraqosh, Tel Keppe, Batnaya and Kocho, and in the region south and east of Mosul the towns Bakhdida, Karamlish, Bartella and Makhmour
The condition of human rights in the territory controlled by the Islamic State (IS) is considered to be one of the worst in the world. The Islamic State's policies included acts of genocide, torture and slavery. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) stated in November 2014 that the Islamic State "seeks to subjugate civilians under its control and dominate every aspect of their lives through terror, indoctrination, and the provision of services to those who obey". Many Islamic State actions of extreme criminality, terror, recruitment and other activities has been documented in the Middle East.
The occupation of Mosul by the Islamic State began after the fall of Mosul when Islamic State fighters took control of the city on 10 June 2014. Mosul was a strategically important city for the Islamic State and was a target by anti-Islamic State forces. Over the course of battles in 2015 and 2016–2017, the Iraqi Armed Forces, aided by Peshmerga and CJTF–OIR forces, fully liberated Mosul by 21 July 2017.
It said that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom the group has now named Caliph Ibrahim, had set a Saturday deadline for Christians who did not want to stay and live under those terms to "leave the borders of the Islamic Caliphate". "After this date, there is nothing between us and them but the sword," it said.