Confiscation of the Assyrian villages by the Kurds
William Warda
staff writer; christiansofiraq.com
August 17, 06
Because of Kurdish wars against the central government of Iraq starting beltwleen 1961 to 1991, Assyrian villages in the mountains north of Mosul along those of the Kurds were bombed and destroyed by the Iraqi army. Their inhabitants who survived had no choice but to take refuge in the cities of Iraq, in Iran, or Turkey.
The newsweek issue of June, 17, 1991 p. 33, in describing the plight of the Christian Assyrians in northern Iraq wrote;
"Like the Kurds they traditionally live in mountainside villages, most of stone houses with flat earthen roofs. And as with Kurdish villages, most of their settlements has been destroyed by the Iraqis. Unlike the Kurds, they speak Syriac an ancient tongue descended from the Aramaic....They are Chaldean Catholics and Nestorians, members of some of Christianity's oldest sects, marooned in the hostile land."
"In northern Iraq_ the ancestral homeland they share with the Kurds_ Saddam's wrath fell on the Christians as much as their muslim neighbors, and they fled together to the borders of Turkey and Iraq. "Everyone talked about the Kurdish refugees", said a Nestorian priest who returned recently from a Turkish refugee camp, but many of us were Christians." Relief workers complained that in the undisciplined melees at the camps in the first week the Christians often had a harder time than the Kurds. Less numerous and without Kurds powerful tribal organization, they often lost in the scramble for relief supplies."
"But when Saddam set out to decimate the Kurds, the Christians suffered alongside them. When an Assyrian civil engineer in Duhuk was drafted to begin destroying villages in [so-called] Kurdistan, his first assignment was a place called Babok- his own home village. "They did' t care if we were Christians or Kurds," he said. "They wanted to destroy all of us."
The article goes on to say that Chaldeans are Eastern rite Catholics who recognize the Pope in Rome as their patriarch. The Nestorians are followers of sect begun with st. Nestor, thrown out of the Catholic Church. "Both sects however consider themselves ethnic Assyrians."
"Some of the Christianity's most ancient monuments were demolished. In the village of Deri, a 12th-century monastery was reduced to rubble in 1988 by Iraqi Army sappers. Monks from the monastery have since moved to a small cave high in the mountains, where they live as hermits still." A forth century Catholic Church of St, Mary in Amadiay along with a Christian village nearby were destroyed.
The Newsweek article ends by saying; "They [Christian Assyrians] are people the world has by and large forgotten, and they know it. Now thy hope that a more democratic Iraq might one day grant them a treasured wish. "With freedom, we might be able to publish something more than just prayer books in our own language" said father Khoshaba, whose name means Sunday. Even Father Sunday's modest goal, however, seems far away in Saddam's Iraq."
Unfortunately for the Christian Assyrians of Iraq Saddam's persecutions have been replaced with the tyranny of the Kurds who in many insidious ways are determent to drive them out of their homeland so that they can claim it as their own.
Most of the abandoned Assyrian village were confiscated and settled by the Kurds after 1991 when the Americans and the British established the Security Zone in the region and helped Kurds to rule it as an in dependant enclave.
After the fall of Saddam Kurds have prevented the Assyrians from returning to their villages, even if they are not presently occupied by the Kurds. While the latter have been brought from all over the world and settled in northern Iraq to increase the Kurdish population into a majority, Assyrians are being gradually driven out of their homeland as a mean of ethnic cleansing. Folwing is another example of how this is being accomplished.
Confiscation of the Assyrian villages by the Kurds
translated from Arabic by Fred Aprim
August 16, 06
The Kurds of the two villages of Swara and Sbandar are preventing the Assyrians of the village of Mezzi in Lower Barwari from returning to their village. Twenty-five Assyrian families submitted petitions to the committee for the village reconstruction headed by Sargis Aghajan, who approved the project. However, when construction began in the village, a group of Kurds from the two villages mentioned above threatened the contractor and the builders to leave the site. Under threat, the contractor and the workers stopped the construction and withdrew from the site.
A petition about the problem was submitted to Franso Jdidi, In Charge of the Reconstruction in Dohuk. The petitioners were told to drop the issue to avoid trouble. Code words meaning Assyrians can not expect equal justice from Kurdish Regional Government, those who continue to pursue this or similar cases will pay dearly with their life or the life of their loved ones.
The people of the village are complaining; they are saying: What is our fault? We want to return to our village. The authorities must help us to achieve that. Why when things are concerned with us they get neglected? Didn't we sacrifice as well in order to gain our rights on our lands or do we have to sacrifice only for no return?
The people of Mezzi were given two options by Kurds: Either buy back the village from the Kurds for three billion Iraqi Dinars since the village does not belong to them any longer, as they were told, or sell it to the Kurds for two billion Iraqi Dinars. Is this fair?
Allowing the Kurds to confiscate the Assyrian villages and to drive them out of the land which they have lived in, long before christianity, before the dawn of Islam until now, and before the invasion of their land by the Kurds in the last centuries or so is a disgrace to the United State which has contributed billions of dollars of the tax payer's money to the Kurdish War Lords to help them claim the northern Iraq as their country.
The Christians of Iraq have been terrorized not only by the Islamic fanatics in southern Iraq. They are prevented by the kurds to live in peace in the north. It is no wonder up to 750,000 of them have fled to Syria, Jordan and Turkey even if it means leaving behind their home, job and livelyhood. They have come to believe there is no one to protect them from the criminals, Islamic fanatics and the racist Kurds. For thousands of years they had survived in their homeland, had preserved their language, religion and culture only to be uprooted by the US's desire to bring democracy to Iraq, but not for them.
How is it possible that US will continue to help financially and otherwise a racist government which refuses to protect a religious and ethnic minority from being threatened, exploited, improvished and being driven out of it homeland?
How ironic that the destruction of the Christian community in Iraq was made possible by President Bush who takes pride in being a Christian but refuses to help christians of Iraq in any shape or form. If things go on as they are soon there will be no Christians left in Iraq. The death of Christianity in Iraq will further insulate the Muslims of that country from the none Muslim world and radicalize them even more against the West.
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