Iraq’s persecuted Assyrian Christians are in limbo - UK Daily Telegraph

Romsin McQuade, 30 Jul 2014

Tim Stanley writes: The religious persecution in Iraq has seen one of the most vibrant Middle East Christian communities almost wiped out – forced to convert, driven from their homes or murdered. Conditions deteriorated after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, improved a little with the US-led surge in 2007 and now, with the advance of Isis, has descended to what might be described as genocide.

However, Romsin McQuade, a university student in America and a descendent of Assyrian Christians, argues that his particular community has always been subject to terror. The Assyrian Church of the East gained official recognition in the 4th century AD. It faced repression under the Ottoman Turks and shuffled around the region as a diaspora for much of the 20th century: moving between Iran and Iraq, while a large contingent found refuge in America. In this article charting the historical challenges facing his people, McQuade offers a solution: the creation of an autonomous safe haven.

At the dawn of the first millennium, the scattered Assyrian people placed all of their faith in Christianity.

Years later, they were court physicians, merchants, and top advisors to various Islamic Abbasid caliphs, while simultaneously managing to become the scapegoat du jour of that very Caliphate. Their houses were marked with pictures of Satan, hundreds of thousands of them murdered, and accused of pledging loyalty to the Romans, their coreligionists, to bring down the Caliphate.

Determined to remain in their ancestral lands – Ashur, Mosul, Tikrit– they found themselves in an all-too-familiar predicament: fleeing – but this time, from the first butcher of Baghdad, Timur, the Mongol ruler bent on exterminating them for being Christian.


Reduced to no more than a mere hundred thousand, most fled their cities to the mountains of Kurdistan in the Ottoman and Persian Empires.

Then, after the Ottoman Army has finished massacring 50 per cent of their population, 20th century Iraq also turned its back on its own natives, executing 3,000 of them in less than five days.

And somehow, those people – the Assyrians, the indigenous Aramaic-speaking people of northern Iraq – took a cursory glance at their wounds, said a prayer, and returned to their daily lives.

But on June 10, the Islamic State reminded Assyrians that those wounds were never closed: they were always open.

Read in full here: Iraq’s persecuted Assyrian Christians are in limbo - Telegraph