The Cross Around My Neck is Heavy to this Day

"So much for the sound of the holy rivers that nourished the fields of wheat. Gone is the smell of the air that moves the arid Earth that I once called home. Far away are the Mountains that shielded me when I fled from the madmen of the East. Here, in gloomy England I live and breathe my last. Grey skies on the cusp of rainfall in Industrial suburbs will be the sight that surrounds my grave. Yet I dream of the fertile land between the rivers and lament that I shall sleep so far away from the halls where my ancestors slept for thousands of years. Someone else lives in my house now and, soon, the walking relic that I am shall turn to a memory of a time long gone. This is the curse of the diaspora Assyrian.


My story begins long ago when the world was new. A City flourished with trade and grew to encompass lands far away from the edges of it’s walls. That city was Assur and no Assyrians live there today. It bequeathed an Empire that stretched from Iraq to Egypt and further. Great Kings built new Cities and engineered Hanging Gardens that mesmerised foreign travellers enough to know that they were in the very centre of the Earth. A grand Civilisation that, as all others before it did and all others after it will, fell into decay. Swift was the fall of the Assyrian Empire. To a people whose worldview incorporated a pantheon of Gods headed by a God of War, to lose a single battle was an apocalyptic sign and, when the battle was lost, sure enough the Empire fell. First it was incorporated into a brief Babylonian Empire but, soon enough, Assyria fell into the hands of the Persians, the first of a long line of foreign invaders. 612 BC was the date that Nineveh fell although a brief resistance continued in the North at Harran until 608 BC. After this point, full political independence was never again achieved.


Yet, there was still hope. One of the legacies of the Neo Assyrian Empire was the emergence of Aramaic as the exclusive language of Iraq and the Levant. It was not the original language of the Assyrians but it became the lingua franca before the fall of the Empire. The Persians, who originally saw themselves as successors to the Assyrian Empire, retained Imperial Aramaic and Assyrian names for the provinces of their Empire. Such was the extent of Assyrianisation that, when the Greeks arrived they named Syria as ‘Syria’, a name derived from the Assyrians. Assyria proper, which is in the North of Iraq but actually stretches into parts of Turkey and overlaps into Syria was the original homeland of the Assyrians. By the time of the Greeks Assyria had morphed into Classical Assyria which was a sort of wider term for a much bigger segment of the Assyrian Empire not limited to Assyria proper. Later, when the Romans arrived and the Persians arrived (again) they split classical Assyria between them. The Romans had Syria province (modern Syria) and the Persian Sassanians had Asoristan which included basically all of Iraq. So, despite the fall of the Assyrian Empire there was an Aramaic speaking people who self identified by a word derived from Assyrian living in Iraq and Syria at this time.


It was in this time that a second Assyrian golden age blossomed. Not one built on war and the God of War but, increasingly, on newer Gods. Prevalent in this time were new religions such as Manicheanism and various Eastern influenced religions as well as Hellenic ones. In the midst of all this, one religion was becoming dominant, Christianity. Semi autonomous Assyrian Kingdoms were the earliest to adopt Christianity as their state religion. Major schools of Christian scholarship emerged in Antioch and Edessa (Urhay) and later, Nisibin. Monasteries dominated the Mountains and Churches the cities. Writers and Poets such as Saint Ephrem and Isaac of Nineveh created Christian works in a uniquely Assyrian style. In this time, Assyrians were persecuted by the Persian Sassanians who pursued a more heavy handed Zoroastrian Orthodoxy than their predecessors and also the Byzantine Romans for perceived unorthodox Christianity. It was in this context that the Arabs came out of Arabia into Assyria.


The Arab invasion was not seen as an immediate calamity for the Assyrians. They were a Semitic people similar to the Assyrians and, at least initially, had many Christians among their ranks. Assyrians saw them as liberators from the harsh taxes and policies of the Persians and Byzantines and were given special positions as translators of Greek philosophical texts for the Arabs. Here there is often a mistaken narrative that the Arabs converted the population rapidly. In fact Abassid writers who travelled around the Empire considered the land from Tikrit upwards to be essentially totally Christian throughout their rule. Though Islam was far more successful in the South of Iraq and the South West of Syria it didn’t really penetrate deep into the Assyrian heartlands. Syriac remained the lingua franca in those parts. Arabisation only extended to the areas that were more solidly Muslim. The Medieval Assyrians were now called the Syrian Christians. Christianity had kept their name and their culture alive.


There were periodic persecutions by the various Islamic Caliphates. One Caliph forced Christians to wear distinctive markers on their clothes. Christians were always considered second class citizens and lows forbid them from prostelytising. They had no fixed tax rates and so bared the brunt of the financial burden of Caliphate war expenses. It was, however, for the most part acceptable, especially by medieval standards. The real calamity for Assyrians arrived with the age of the migrations and, specifically, the migration of the Turks and the Mongol invasions from Central Asia. The Seljuk Turks were not especially bad and the early Mongols were actually favourable to the Assyrians because of earlier missionary efforts to Central Asia. However, the later Mongol Warlords converted to Islam (mainly for political reasons) and, one of them, Timur would inflict the first great Assyrian persecution. Timur decimated the entire Assyrian population. His brutal genocidal campaign kicked the Assyrians out of the great Cities of the former Caliphate and out even of Assyria proper. Tikrit was gone, Erbil was gone, Mosul (Nineveh) was gone, although a Christian community would quickly resurface there. It was at this time, that Ashur was finally and definitively destroyed.


The Assyrians now lived exclusively in villages in the mountains of South East Turkey and North Western Iran. Kurdish villagers took their place in their former heartlands, a trend that continues to the modern day. Assyrians still had some autonomy in their new lands. Hakkari was controlled by the patriarch of the Church of the East, they still held on in Zakho down to the Nineveh Plains. There was a brief resurgence over the next few centuries as they rebuilt on a much smaller scale as part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were, in their earlier incarnation quite tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities. However, tribal warfare between Assyrians and Kurds was quite prevalent at the time and led to several massacres of Assyrians in the 1800’s, most significantly by Bedr Khan. This century would mark the beginning of the end of the Assyrian Nation as it had been the previous centuries and culminated in Seyfo. In 1915 the fascist Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire was running their part in the Great War. Assyrians and Armenians were relying on the Russian Empire to hold their historic lands while the Turks were allied with several Kurdish tribes. When the Russians withdrew from the war, the Turks unleashed a huge genocidal campaign against all non-Muslim civilians in what was left of the dying Empire. The Assyrians lost two thirds of their population and were purged almost entirely from the land that became known as Turkey. As previously, Kurds now occupied their homes.


Then, what was left of the Assyrian nation limped into Iraq and, in desperation, worked for the British Army in return for settlement and citizenship. A return to their Ancient homeland was marked by xenophobia from an Arab and Kurdish population that had forgotten who they were and saw them as collaborators with the British. This reached a fever pitch when the British formally left Iraq. At this stage, Assyrians still made up the largest population in the Nineveh Plains and today’s Dohuk Governate and Akre and were asking for autonomy in this minuscule remnant of a homeland. They were denied with ferocity. In 1933 the Iraqi army (or a rogue Kurdish general depending on who you ask) launched the Simele Campaign which killed up to 3000 unarmed Assyrian Civilians while many others fled to the Khabour River in Syria. An echo of the Genocide just under 20 years earlier, Assyrians were at this point already turning up in countries all around the world. Now comprising just around 5 percent of the Iraqi population and a smaller figure in Syria, Assyrians attempted to continue onward in the face of a new phenomena, Arab nationalism.


Assyrians in Iraq were encouraged to identify as Arab Christians. Though they made up the largest population in places such as Qamishle in Syria and Dohuk in Iraq, they were witnessing mass migration of Kurds into these newly industrialised areas. Though they had a vibrant community in Baghdad, the toll of several wars and economic sanctions led to many seeking emigration abroad. Then the 2003 Iraq war and the subsequent problems of Islamic fundamentalist groups further accelerated their emigration. Though this was all of Iraq’s problem it impacted the Assyrians heavily because they were already a smaller population prone to emigration. They were still asking for autonomy but now in the much smaller Nineveh Plains region where they still made up a slight majority. Just when the Iraqi Government appeared to be moving towards a Nineveh Plains solution, ISIS arrived to expel Assyrians from their ancient capital at Mosul and from part of the Nineveh Plains. In the last week, ISIS captured 250 villagers from the Khabour River in Syria who had fled Simele 80 years earlier.


So, here I am. The Cross around my neck is heavy on this day. Though it saved my people our name and culture in the past, today it is the object of ridicule in my homeland. It has been taken from me so cruelly. I wish I was born at any other time in my people’s history other than this. I wish I could have seen Assyria when it was new but, alas, I must be there at her sad end. It was one too many calamities in a row the wise men tell me. Still, my last thoughts are with my neighbours. My heart is filled with anger towards the Arabs and the Turks and the Kurds and all those who have torn my land into pieces and grabbed a piece for themselves. My despair and sorrow has filled me with a vengeance such that I wish to curse the land forever and all its inheritors. Yet, the sad eyed man God intervenes. He taught me, above all else, to love my neighbours. So, I love my neighbours. I just wish that they hadn’t killed me for believing in the God of neighbourly love."





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