Assyrian nationalism
Assyrian nationalism is a movement of the Assyrian people that advocates for independence or autonomy within the regions they inhabit in northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, northwestern Iran, and southeastern Turkey.
The United Nations Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization recognises the modern Assyrians as an indigenous people of south-east Turkey, north-east Syria and the fringes of north-west Iran, as does the Political Dictionary of the Modern Middle East.
Background
Assyrians are the indigenous peoples of Mesopotamia, whose ancestors established the Assyrian Empire in what is modern day Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The empire lasted from perhaps as early as the 25th century BC until its collapse around 7th century AD. The movement emerged in the late 19th century in a climate of increasing ethnic and religious persecution of the Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire, and is today commonly espoused by Assyrians in the Assyrian diaspora.Historically, the region of Assyria had been a melting pot of many peoples, including, but not limited to, Sumerians, Hurrians, Akkadians, Amorites, Arameans, Jews, Medes, Persians, Elamites and the Hittites. Ancient Assyrians were likely a mix of these groups of people. Though some elements of these groups dominated more, but overall the Assyrian identity was not based on an ethnic background. In fact, Assyrians did not become an ethnic group until the adoption of Christianity in the Near East in the 1st century AD. Only when Assyrians adopted Christianity, they became more endogamous due to their religion.
Ideology
The ideology of Assyrian nationalism is based on the political and national unification of ethnic Assyrian followers of a number of Syriac Christian Churches with classical Syriac as its cultural language and Eastern Aramaic dialects as spoken tongues. Its main proponents in the late 19th century and early 20th century were Naum Faiq, Freydun Atturaya, Ashur Yousif, Malik Khoshaba and Farid Nazha.Within the Syriac Christian population in the near east as a whole, Assyrianism is confined specifically by certain geographic, ethnic, linguistic and confessional boundaries.
Geographically and linguistically an Assyrianist position is held by those who speak Eastern Aramaic dialects who live or descend from those who once lived in the northern half of Iraq, the north-east of Syria, south-eastern Turkey and north-western Iran.
Theologically, the position is a little more complex.
Followers of the Assyrian Church of the East, Ancient Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic Church, Assyrian Pentecostal Church and Assyrian Evangelical Church usually adhere to an Assyrianist position, although sometimes the term Chaldo-Assyrian is used to avoid theological conflict between Assyrian followers of the original Church of the East and those who broke away between the late 17th and early 19th centuries and entered communion with the Roman Catholic Church, which named this new church the Chaldean Catholic Church in 1830. Chaldean Catholics should not be confused with ancient Chaldeans, a long extinct people with whom they share no links.
Eastern Aramaic-speaking populations who follow the Syriac Orthodox Church and Syriac Catholic Church and live or descend from those who lived in northern Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey, northwest Iran and the southern Caucasus tend to regard themselves as Assyrian, whereas formerly Western Aramaic-speaking and now almost exclusively Arabic-speaking Levantine members of these churches from the rest of Syria, Lebanon and south-central Turkey often espouse an Aramean, Phoenician or even Greek heritage temple to Ashur.
Organisations advocating Assyrianism are the Assyrian Democratic Organisation, Assyrian National Congress, Assyrian Universal Alliance and Shuraya. The Assyrian flag was designed by the Assyrian Universal Alliance in 1968.
Mordechai Nisan, the Israeli Orientalist, also supports the view that Assyrians should be named specifically as such in an ethnic and national sense, are the descendants of their ancient namesakes, and denied self-expression for political, ethnic and religious reasons.
Dr. Arian Ishaya, a historian and anthropologist of UCLA, states that the confusion of names applied to the Assyrians, and a denial of Assyrian identity and continuity, is on one hand borne out of 19th- and early 20th-century imperialism and condescension on the part of the west, rather than by historical fact, and on the other hand by long-held Islamic, Arab, Kurdish, Turkish and Iranian policies, whose purpose is to divide the Assyrian people along false lines and deny their singular identity, with the aim of preventing the Assyrians having any chance of unity, self-expression and potential statehood.
Naum Elias Yaqub Palakh, a 19th-century advocate of Assyrian nationalism from the Syriac Orthodox Church community in Diyarbakir, encouraged Assyrians to unite regardless of tribal and theological differences.
Ashur Yousif, an Assyrian Protestant from the same region of south-eastern Turkey as Faiq, also espoused Assyrian unity during the early 20th century, stating that the Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic and Syriac Orthodox Assyrians were one people, divided purely upon religious lines.
Freydun Atturaya also advocated Assyrian unity and was a staunch supporter of Assyrian identity and nationalism and the formation of an ancestral Assyrian homeland in the wake of the Assyrian genocide.
Farid Nazha, an influential Syrian-born Assyrian nationalist, was deeply critical of the leaders of the various churches adhered to by Assyrians, accusing the Syriac Orthodox Church, Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic Church and Syriac Catholic Church of creating divisions among them, when their joint ethnic and national identity should be paramount.
Irredentism
The ideology of Assyrian independence is a political movement that supports the re-creation of Assyria as a nation state corresponding to part of the original Assyrian homeland, in the Nineveh plains of northern Iraq. The issue of Assyrian independence has been brought up many times throughout the course of history from before World War I to the present-day Iraq War. The Assyrian-inhabited area of Iraq is located primarily but not exclusively in the Ninawa-Mosul region in northern Iraq where the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh was located. This area is known as the "Assyrian Triangle." Assyrians are generally found all over northern Iraq, including in and around the cities of Mosul, Erbil, Kirkuk, Dohuk, Amadia and Rawanduz, and there are a fair number of exclusively Assyrian towns, villages, hamlets and agricultural communities in the north, together with others that have significant Assyrian populations. Other communities exist over the borders in south-eastern Turkey, north-eastern Syria region and north-western Iran.In post-Ba'thist Iraq, the Assyrian Democratic Movement was one of the smaller political parties that emerged in the social chaos of the occupation. Its officials say that while Assyrian members of the ADM also took a full and active 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.