Kurdish Officials Employ Saddam
Hossain's Tactics

Saddam Hossain protested by saying: "Christian Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) are the descendents of those who built Iraq thousands of years earlier, they are the real history of Iraq." Saddam asked, "why are the Kurds Kurdifying them forcefully, why not give them the freedom and opportunity to express and be who they really are?"

November 19, 2006

William M Warda
California

There was a telling moment during the Saddam Hossain's trial on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 which exposed the Kurdish officials' attempts to undermine the Assyrian identity of the Christians of Iraq, and going as far as pretending that only Kurds were persecuted by Saddam during what is known as Anfal campaign.

A Kurdish witness testified that "not all the destroyed villages during the Anfal operation of 1988 were Kurdish." To prove that only the Kurd villages were destoryed by Saddam the witness's personal attorney who was also a Kurd asked him : "Did you live in these bombed villages? Were their inhabitants non-Kurds, or Kurds?" Speaking in Kurdish language the witness reiterated that some destroyed villages were entirely Christian while others were occupied by Christians and Muslims. The official translator who was also a Kurd, translated the term Muslims into Kurds but made no mention of the ethnicity of the Christians who could only be described as Assyrians. To add insult to injury the Lawyer asserted that : "All these Christians were Kurds."

This was another example of Kurds attempt to undermine the Assyrian identity of the Christians of Iraq so that they can be denied their rights to their confiscated villages by the Kurds. Only during the last few years a number of Kurds have been converted to Christianity by the American evangelists. Before then it was a common practice for the relatives of an apostate to murder him or her for leaving Islam, and Kurds have been historically the worst persecutors of the Christians. During world war One many Kurdish tribes joined the Turks in decimating the Christians in Iran, Turkey, and the highlands of Iraq. The fact is there has not been a Kurdish community which has identified itself as Christian for as long as history can remember.

It is interesting that the word used by the Kurd witness for Christians was 'Falah' which means agriculturalist. This was applied after the 7th century AD invasion of Mesopotamia by the Arabs to the Christians becuase they were growers and framers but the invading Arabs had no such skills therefore depended on the Christians to provide them with fruits, vegetables, wheat and other farming and edible products, in addition to paying exuberant taxes to the Arab treasury.

In response to the Kurdish lawyer Saddam Hossain protested by saying: "Christian Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) are the descendents of those who built Iraq thousands of years earlier, they are the real history of Iraq." Saddam asked, "why are the Kurds Kurdifying them forcefully? Why not give them the freedom and opportunity to express and be who they really are?"

Saddam Hossain knows the Assyrians real well, he did his best to Arabize them because their existence proclaimed to the world that they are the indigenous people of the land. He destoryed their villages to drive them out of the northern Iraq region to sactter them in other countries and large cities so that they can be melted away. He did not allow them to be identified as Assyrians in the census or the official papers, he forced many to sign ethnic correction statements claiming they are Arabs, he rewrote the history text books where he claimed, contrary to the historical facts, that the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians were Arabs. He decreed that Christian Assyrians should give their children Arab names only. He imprisoned and killed Assyrian nationalists who dared to ask for equal rights for their people.The same Kurds who condemned Saddam for his ethnic cleansing tactics and put him on trial for such sins see nothing wrong with employing his methods to undermine the Assyrian identity of the Christians of Iraq in hope that they can kurdify them thru deceit and misinformation.

Documented evidences prove that the Christian inhabitants of the villages destroyed during the Anfal or other campaigns were all Assyrians, but Kurds want to subvert the truth to serve their political schemes. The June, 17, 1991 p. 33, article in the Newsweek reported the destruction of the Assyrian villages and their churches during the Anfal period.

The article reads: "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 melee 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."

Kurds often complain that they only were driven out of Kirkuk, but HRW Report, March 2003, Human Rights Watch documents on War in Iraq declared that: "Since the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi government has systematically expelled an estimated 120,000 Kurds, Turkomans, and Assyrians from Kirkuk and other towns and villages in this oil-rich region. Most have settled in the Kurdish-controlled northern provinces. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has resettled Arab families in their place in an attempt to reduce the political power and presence of ethnic minorities, a process known as "Arabization."

See: http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/iraq/
Also: http://www.kurd.org/newsletters