Assyrian
Assyrians are the indigenous Nestorian Christians in northern Iraq, who read and write Aramaic, a Semitic language, which is used in their religious observances. The Assyrians claim descent from the Assyrian nation that conquered ancient Syria, Israel and Mesopotamia in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.
In Iraq, a few churches dating back to the fifth century still dot the northern countryside. In 1915 the Assyrian Christians tried to throw off Ottoman Turkish rule but were butchered, along with another Christian tribe, the Armenians. Thousands fled into exile. The Assyrian diaspora includes a community in Chicago that numbers as much as 80,000, more than in any other American city
In modern times, the group, which today numbers about 1.25 to 1.5 million, has been doubly mistreated; first by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime, which forbade them to teach Aramaic, and then by their Kurdish landlords.
Assyrians were deprived of their cultural and national rights. There were only two nationalities in Saddam Hussein's Iraq: Arab and Kurdish.Assyrians were not identified in Iraqi censuses.
After Saddam's fall, the Assyrian Democratic Party was one of the smaller emergent political parties in the social chaos of the occupation. Though members of ADM, its officials make pains to note, 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.
Assyrians are not Arabs racially, ethnically, or culturally. Historically, they have contributed to the rise of the Arabic civilization during the Abbasid period and many scientists and scholars were in fact Assyrian (or Syriac). They have their own rich history which is distinct from the Arabs (in fact, the Assyrians were the first manufactureres of a sophisticated civilization in ancient times and prior to the Islamic expansion they made several breakthroughs in the fields of astronomy, philosophy and medicine) and were builders of the first known world-empire in antiquity under Sargon I that encompassed the western borders of modern-day Iran, all of Syria and Mesopotamia (Iraq), Palestine, southeast Anatolia, the Armenian highlands, Egypt and Sudan.
