Origins

Assyrians in Canada trace their origins to an ancient people whose homeland straddled the mountains and plains of what is today southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran. This is a single geographic zone that once formed the main part of Assyria, the successor to the Babylonian Empire. Assyria functioned as an independent state for nearly a thousand years, from about 1600 to 600 B.C.E.

Today, the vast majority of Assyrians in the traditional homeland live in Iraq (1.2 million), with only small numbers in neighbouring Iran (20,000) and Turkey (10,000). There are as well an estimated 650,000 Assyrians living abroad, mostly in neighbouring Syria (250,000) and Lebanon (100,000) as well as in the United States (300,000). Assyrians in the homeland do not live in a single compact territory but rather are scattered throughout towns and villages of a countryside that for the most part is inhabited by Kurds. The Assyrians are distinguished from their neighbours by their language and religion.

Assyrians speak various dialects of Aramaic, a Semitic language that had become the lingua franca of Assyria during its last centuries of existence. Although many in the group call their language Assyrian, scholars refer to it as neo-Aramaic, Chaldean, or Syriac.

Assyrians believe that their acceptance of Christianity dates back to the first century C.E. Sometime in the fifth century, the Assyrian community became split between the Nestorians and the Jacobites. The Nestorians, whose name comes from Nestorius, the early-fifth-century patriarch of Constantinople who refused to accept the decisions reached at the church council of Ephesus in 431, were supporters of the Eastern Christian Church of Byzantium. The Jacobites are named for the followers of Jacobus Baradeus, who accepted the monophysite views of the Church of Antioch. Until today, both the Nestorian Church of the East and the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church are considered heretic by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

The Assyrian Christians were split further in the sixteenth century following the arrival of Jesuit and later Protestant missionaries. Some Nestorians converted to Roman Catholicism and became known as Chaldeans, while the Jacobites who converted were called Syrian Catholics. During the nineteenth century, further missionary activity succeeded in attracting some Assyrians to Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, and several Protestant denominations, but it is the four older groups that continue to maintain hierarchies with seats in the homeland or in neighbouring Middle Eastern countries: the Nestorians (Church of the East), the Jacobites (Syrian Orthodox Church), the Chaldeans, and the Syrian Catholics.

Deeply divided along confessional lines, the different Assyrian groups did not become aware of a common historical and linguistic heritage until the rise of national consciousness among various peoples of the Middle East in the nineteenth century. Civic organizations emerged in Nestorian and Jacobite centres that promoted through publications the idea of Assyrian national unity.

Since the sixteenth century, the Assyrian homeland had been part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, whose ability to rule its far-flung domains was severely undermined by the time World War I broke out in 1914. Armed with a sense of their recently discovered cultural and linguistic unity, and encouraged by Western missionaries to support the “Christian powers,” the Assyrians fought against the Ottoman Turks on the side of the Allies in the hope that they would acquire territorial sovereignty after the war. Angered by the alliance, both the Ottoman Turkish and Persian governments massacred and deported tens of thousands of Assyrians, who fled northward to the Transcaucasian region of the Russian Empire or southward to refugee camps in the British-controlled zone of what later became Iraq.

After the war, the Assyrians were not granted a separate homeland. Instead, Iraq was created as a British mandate, and, although the Assyrian refugees (mostly Nestorians from southeastern Turkey) were promised an autonomous district in an area around the town of Mosul in northern Iraq, this never occurred. Following an abortive revolt in 1933 in which the Assyrians participated, many were killed or driven out of Iraq and forced to seek refuge in neighbouring Syria, Lebanon, and other countries in Europe and North America.

The Assyrian community that remained in Iraq became mobilized in the wake of the Persian Gulf War of 1990. With the defeat of Iraq and the establishment of a free zone in the northern part of the country under the protection of United Nations forces, Assyrians reached a modus vivendi with the Kurds (with whom they have frequently clashed), and they have played an active role in the newly formed and self-governing region of Kurdistan. The Assyrian Democratic Movement (ZOWA) has elected representatives to the Kurdish parliament and has been instrumental in helping to rebuild the homes and farms of Assyrians displaced by the conflicts with the Kurds and the Iraqi army that reached its peak during the 1970s. The Assyrian Democratic Movement has been assisted in its efforts by Assyrian immigrant organizations in Europe and North America.